Manually generating Nix expressions

We believe that imports from derivations (IFDs) provide tremendous value in nix and the aversion towards them stems mostly from poor tooling and ci support for them. We do not believe that poor tooling or ci support should cripple nix capability of abstraction. Hence haskell.nix makes excessive use of IFDs.

We do note however that there are users who prefer to have IFD-free expressions. For this group of users we detail how to expand the IFD dependent high level functions into their IFD free building blocks.

The general structure will be the same, independent of the use of Stack or Cabal.

Let us assume for now that we have already generated a pkgs.nix expression (see the links bellow). The following file then produces a package set:

# default.nix
let
  # Import the Haskell.nix library,
  pkgs = import <nixpkgs> (import (builtins.fetchTarball "https://github.com/input-output-hk/haskell.nix/archive/master.tar.gz") {}).nixpkgsArgs;

  # Import the file you will create in the stack-to-nix or cabal-to-nix step.
  my-pkgs = import ./pkgs.nix;

  # Stack projects use this:
  # pkgSet = pkgs.haskell-nix.mkStackPkgSet {
  #   stack-pkgs = my-pkgs;
  #   pkg-def-extras = [
  #     # these extras will provide additional packages
  #     # ontop of the package set.  E.g. extra-deps
  #     # for stack packages. or local packages for
  #     # cabal.projects
  #   ];
  #   modules = [
  #     # specific package overrides would go here
  #     # example:
  #     #  packages.cbors.package.ghcOptions = "-Werror";
  #     #  packages.cbors.patches = [ ./one.patch ];
  #     #  packages.cbors.flags.optimize-gmp = false;
  #     # It may be better to set flags in stack.yaml instead
  #     # (`stack-to-nix` will include them as defaults).
  #   ];
  # };

  # Cabal projects use this:
  pkgSet = pkgs.haskell-nix.mkCabalProjectPkgSet {
    plan-pkgs = my-pkgs;
    pkg-def-extras = [];
    modules = [
      # specific package overrides would go here
      # example:
      #  packages.cbors.package.ghcOptions = "-Werror";
      #  packages.cbors.patches = [ ./one.patch ];
      #  packages.cbors.flags.optimize-gmp = false;
      # It may be better to set flags in `cabal.project` instead
      # (`plan-to-nix` will include them as defaults).
    ];
  };

in pkgSet.config.hsPkgs // { _config = pkgSet.config; }

With this setup you can then start building the components of interest:

nix build -f default.nix $pkg.components.library

to build the library for $pkg or

nix build -f default.nix $pkg.components.exes.$exe

to build a specific executable. The same holds for test suites and benchmarks.

Using Stack

With nix-tools installed, we can simply run the following command on a stack project:

stack-to-nix --output . --stack-yaml stack.yaml

This will produce a pkgs.nix file that looks like the following:

{
  resolver = "lts-12.17";
  extras = hackage:
    {
      packages = {
        "o-clock" = hackage.o-clock."0.1.1".revisions.default;
        ...
      } // {
        my-package = ./my-package.nix;
        ...
      };
    };
}

This file contains the stackage resolver, as well as set of extra packages. The extras specifies which extra-deps (here: o-clock-0.1.1) we wanted to add over the stackage snapshot, and what local packages we want (here: my-package).

Using Cabal

Generating plan.json

To get a plan, you need Cabal and GHC. See the How to install a compiler section of the Nixpkgs Manual for information about how to choose a specific compiler version.

Note: Cabal version

The minimum Cabal version is 2.4. This version is available in the NixOS 19.03 release.

For this example, we will run a nix-shell with the default GHC version for Nixpkgs.

nix-shell -p haskellPackages.cabal-install haskellPackages.ghc \
    --run "cabal new-configure"

If all goes well, you should now have the file dist-newstyle/cache/plan.json.

Tip: Specifying the GHC version

To use a specific compiler version, replace haskellPackages.ghc with something like haskell-nix.compiler.ghc865. The given compiler must exist in your Nixpkgs version, of course. See also the Nixpkgs Manual.

Using plan-to-nix

With nix-tools installed, we can then run the following command on a Cabal project and its build plan. Omit the --cabal-project option if you don't have a project file.

# convert the plan.json file into a pkgs.nix file
plan-to-nix --output . \
    --plan-json dist-newstyle/cache/plan.json
    --cabal-project cabal.project

This will produce a pkgs.nix file that looks like the following:

{
  pkgs = hackage:
    {
      packages = {
        "o-clock" = hackage.o-clock."0.1.1".revisions.default;
        ...
      };
      compiler = { ... };
    };

  extras = hackage:
    { packages = { my-package = ./.plan.nix/my-package.nix; }; };
}

It has converted Cabal's build plan into a Nix expression that selects dependencies from hackage.nix. All local packages in the project are generated with cabal-to-nix and added to the package set description.