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More on installation

Customisation of the installation scripts

The scripts offered to install GHCup are available here:

  • bootstrap-haskell for Unix-like operating systems
  • bootstrap-haskell.ps1 for Windows (PowerShell). This will, in turn, run the final bootstrap script (by default, that for the Unix-like operating systems).

The effect of the scripts can be customised by setting one or more BOOTSTRAP_HASKELL_* environment variables (as set out in the first script) and, in the case of Windows, by specifying parameters (as set out in the PowerShell script).

For example, you can toggle:

  • non-interactive installation
  • a more verbose installation
  • whether to install only GHCup (and, on Windows, MSYS2)
  • not to trigger the upgrade of GHCup
  • whether to install the latest version of HLS
  • whether to install the latest version of Stack
  • whether to respect the XDG Base Directory Specification
  • whether to adjust (prepend) the PATH in bashrc
  • on Windows, whether to adjust MINGW paths in cabal.config

You can also specify:

  • the GHC version to install
  • the Cabal version to install
  • which downloader to use (the default is curl)
  • the base URL for the download of the GHCup binary distribution

On Windows, you can also use the parameters to:

  • toggle whether to overwrite a previous installation
  • specify the GHCup installation root directory
  • specify the Cabal root directory
  • specify the directory of an existing installation of MSYS2 (for example, the one supplied by Stack)
  • specify the URL of the final bootstrap script
  • toggle whether to run the final bootstrap script via bash (instead of in a new MSYS2 shell)

Installing custom bindists

There are a couple of good use cases to install custom bindists:

  1. manually built bindists (e.g. with patches)
    • example: ghcup install ghc -u 'file:///home/mearwald/tmp/ghc-eff-patches/ghc-8.10.2-x86_64-deb10-linux.tar.xz' 8.10.2-eff
  2. GHC head CI bindists
    • example specifying a branch (master): ghcup install ghc -u 'https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/jobs/artifacts/master/raw/ghc-x86_64-linux-fedora33-release.tar.xz?job=x86_64-linux-fedora33-release' head
    • example specifying a job id (1129565): ghcup install ghc -u ' https://gitlab.haskell.org/api/v4/projects/1/jobs/1129565/artifacts/ghc-x86_64-linux-alpine3_12-validate+fully_static.tar.xz' mr7847
  3. DWARF bindists
    • example: ghcup install ghc -u 'https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.10.2/ghc-8.10.2-x86_64-deb10-linux-dwarf.tar.xz' 8.10.2-dwarf

Since the version parser is pretty lax, 8.10.2-eff and head are both valid versions and produce the binaries ghc-8.10.2-eff and ghc-head respectively. GHCup always needs to know which version the bindist corresponds to (this is not automatically detected).

Isolated installs

Before using isolated installs, make sure to have at least GHCup version 0.1.17.8!

Ghcup also enables you to install a tool (GHC, Cabal, HLS, Stack) at an isolated location of your choosing. These installs, as the name suggests, are separate from your main installs and DO NOT conflict with them.

  • No symlinks are made to these isolated installed tools, you'd have to manually point to them wherever you intend to use them.

  • These installs, can also NOT be deleted from ghcup, you'd have to go and manually delete these.

You need to use the --isolate or -i flag followed by the directory path.

Examples:

  1. install an isolated GHC version at location /home/user/isolated_dir/ghc/

    • ghcup install ghc 8.10.5 --isolate /home/user/isolated_dir/ghc

  2. isolated install Cabal at a location you desire

    • ghcup install cabal --isolate /home/username/my_isolated_dir/

  3. do an isolated install with a custom bindist

    • ghcup install ghc --isolate /home/username/my_isolated_dir/ -u 'https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/jobs/artifacts/master/raw/ghc-x86_64-linux-fedora33-release.tar.xz?job=x86_64-linux-fedora33-release' head

  4. isolated install HLS

    • ghcup install hls --isolate /home/username/dir/hls/

  5. you can even compile ghc to an isolated location.

    • ghcup compile ghc -j 4 -v 9.0.1 -b 8.10.5 -i /home/username/my/dir/ghc