Getting started¶

haskell.nix can automatically translate your Cabal or Stack project and its dependencies into Nix code.

Assuming you have Nix installed, you can start setting up your project.

Setting up the Cachix binary cache¶

You can avoid compiling GHC and nix-tools by configuring Cachix so you can benefit from the binary cache built by CI:

$ nix-env -iA cachix -f https://cachix.org/api/v1/install
installing 'cachix-0.3.8'
building '/nix/store/bh176xhpk4wrjm56iahm86wf85jaz23v-user-environment.drv'...
created 42 symlinks in user environment

$ cachix use iohk
Configured https://iohk.cachix.org binary cache in ~/.config/nix/nix.conf

Scaffolding¶

The following work with stack.yaml and cabal.project based projects.

Add default.nix:

{ # Fetch the latest haskell.nix and import its default.nix
  haskellNix ? import (builtins.fetchTarball "https://github.com/input-output-hk/haskell.nix/archive/master.tar.gz") {}

# haskell.nix provides access to the nixpkgs pins which are used by our CI,
# hence you will be more likely to get cache hits when using these.
# But you can also just use your own, e.g. '<nixpkgs>'.
, nixpkgsSrc ? haskellNix.sources.nixpkgs-2003

# haskell.nix provides some arguments to be passed to nixpkgs, including some
# patches and also the haskell.nix functionality itself as an overlay.
, nixpkgsArgs ? haskellNix.nixpkgsArgs

# import nixpkgs with overlays
, pkgs ? import nixpkgsSrc nixpkgsArgs
}: pkgs.haskell-nix.project {
  # 'cleanGit' cleans a source directory based on the files known by git
  src = pkgs.haskell-nix.haskellLib.cleanGit {
    name = "haskell-nix-project";
    src = ./.;
  };
  # For `cabal.project` based projects specify the GHC version to use.
  compiler-nix-name = "ghc884"; # Not used for `stack.yaml` based projects.
}

Working with a project¶

Top-level attributes are Haskell packages (incl. dependencies) part of your project.

To build the library component of a package in the project run:

nix-build -A your-package-name.components.library

There are also other components such as exes, tests, benchmarks and all. To build an executable:

nix-build -A your-package-name.components.exes.your-exe-name

To open a shell for use with cabal run:

nix-shell -A shellFor
cabal new-repl your-package-name:library:your-package-name
cabal new-build your-package-name

To open a shell for use with stack see the following issue.

Pinning the haskell.nix version¶

For simplicity's sake we will use fetchTarball for the examples in this documentation. This will always get the latest version, and is similar to an auto-updating Nix channel.

However, in your own project, you may wish to pin haskell.nix (as you would pin Nixpkgs). This will make your builds reproducible, more predictable, and faster (because the fixed version is cached).

Straightforward way of doing this is to change the branch name to a revision.

{ # Fetch a specific haskell.nix and import its default.nix
 haskellNix ? import (builtins.fetchTarball "https://github.com/input-output-hk/haskell.nix/archive/f1a94a4c82a2ab999a67c3b84269da78d89f0075.tar.gz") {}

...

There are other possible schemes for pinning. See Bumping Hackage and Stackage snapshots and Nix tutorial on reproducibility using pinning.

Going forward¶

Read through project function reference to see how the API works.

There are a number of things to explore further in the tutorials section.