Cabal

This Cabal Git repository contains the following main packages:

• Cabal: the Cabal library package (license)
• Cabal-hooks: the library providing an API for the Cabal Hooks build type (license)
• Cabal-syntax: the .cabal file format library (license)
• cabal-install: the package containing the cabal tool (license)
• cabal-install-solver: the package containing the solver component of the cabal tool (license)

The canonical upstream repository is located at https://github.com/haskell/cabal.

Proposals for the Cabal project

The proposals process is the mechanism which developers can gain the necessary consensus to make larger changes to the Cabal ecosystem.

• It is light-weight, a PR is opened and discussed on cabal-proposals repo with a fixed discussion period.
• It is developer-led, final decisions are made by developers at the Cabal developers meeting.
• It is flexible, there is no formal voting procedure, decisions are made by rough consensus.

Ways to get the cabal-install binary

1. GHCup (preferred): get GHCup using the directions on its website and run:

   ghcup install --set cabal latest
   

2. Download from official website: the cabal-install binary download for your platform should contain the cabal executable.

Preview Releases

Getting unreleased versions of cabal-install: gives you a chance to try out yet-unreleased features. Currently, we only provide binaries for x86_64 platforms.

1. GitHub preview release built from the tip of the master branch: download from GitHub or use this GHCup command to install:

   ghcup install cabal -u https://github.com/haskell/cabal/releases/download/cabal-head/cabal-head-Linux-x86_64.tar.gz head
   

   Replace "Linux" with "Windows" or "macOS" as appropriate.

   The default Linux build is dynamically linked against zlib, gmp and glibc. You will need to have appropriate versions of these libraries installed to use it. Alternatively a statically linked "Linux-static" binary is also provided.

   You might need to add the following to your cabal.project file if your build fails because of an out-of-date Cabal library:

   allow-newer:
     *:Cabal,
     *:Cabal-syntax
   
   source-repository-package
       type: git
       location: https://github.com/haskell/cabal.git
       subdir: Cabal Cabal-syntax
   

2. Even more cutting-edge binaries built from pull requests are always available from the Validate workflow page on GitHub, at the very bottom of the page, or from the build-alpine workflow for statically linked Linux builds.

Ways to build cabal-install for everyday use

1. With cabal-install: if you have a pre-existing version of cabal-install, run:

   cabal install cabal-install
   

   to get the latest version of cabal-install. (You may want to cabal update first.)

2. From Git: again with a pre-existing version of cabal-install, you can install the latest version from the Git repository. Clone the Git repository, move to its root, and run:

   cabal install --project-file=cabal.release.project cabal-install
   

3. Bootstrapping: if you don't have a pre-existing version of cabal-install, look into the bootstrap directory.

Learn how to use cabal and get support

cabal comes with a thorough User Manual. If you are new to cabal and want to quickly learn the basics, check Getting Started With Haskell and Cabal.

Got questions? Ask in Haskell Matrix (online chat) or Haskell Discourse.

Support window

Our GHC support window is three years (reference) for both the Cabal library and cabal-install. That is:

• Cabal library must be buildable out-of-the-box against the boot libraries shipped with GHC, for any GHC released in the past three years from Cabal library release date.
• cabal-install should be buildable with bootstrap/bootstrap.py script, for any GHC released in the past three years from cabal-install release date.
• cabal-install should be able to drive the most recent minor version of any GHCs major version released in the past three years from cabal-install release date. In this context, "drive" means cabal-install will work with the Cabal library (usually but not always the one that came with the ghc version) used to build the package.

Self-upgrade to the latest version (i.e. cabal install cabal-install) must work with all versions of cabal-install released during the last three years.

Cabal maintainers try to support GHC versions older than three years on a minimal-effort basis.

Build for hacking and contributing to cabal

Refer to CONTRIBUTING.md.

Maintainers

Refer to MAINTAINERS.md.