As part of my eagerness to learn Haskell, I thought it might be a good idea to start building real world applications in Haskell. I chose Yesod to start building a dynamic web application backed by as database. However, the getting started page on Yesod website didn’t exactly work as advertised, probably because the Haskell Stack had some API change. These steps worked for me.

  • Install haskell-stack. It lets you develop, build and test Haskell apps without creating dependency version issues across projects. If you are coming from a ruby world, it is similar to rbenv.

sudo pacman -S haskell-stack

  • Checkout the yesod-mongodb template. This is going to create a haskell-webapp directory and checkout stuff from the yesod-mongo template. Make sure that you don’t provide a directory name which is the name of a package, like yesod, ghci etc.

stack new haskell-webapp yesod-mongo

  • Install libtinfo from AUR because Arch screwed up (from stack perspective). There is another nuance to take care of. Edit the PKGBUILD and ensure that the line that simlinks /usr/lib/libtinfo.so.5 is uncommented. Otherwise the next step doesn’t work.

  • Setup GHCi and friends.

stack build yesod-bin cabal-install --install-ghc

  • Build the libs.

stack build

  • Hello World!

stack exec -- yesod devel

To access your server visit http://localhost:3000