CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Cabal

Building Cabal for hacking

If you use the latest version of cabal published on Hackage, it is sufficient to run:

cabal build cabal

If not, you aren't able to build the testsuite, so you need to disable the default cabal.project that implies configuring the testsuite, e.g., with:

cabal build --project-file=cabal.project.release cabal

Note If you're using Nix, you might find it convenient to work within a shell that has all the Cabal development dependencies:

$ nix-shell -p cabal-install ghc ghcid haskellPackages.fourmolu_0_12_0_0 pkgconfig zlib.dev

A Nix flake developer shell with these dependencies is also available, supported solely by the community, through the command nix develop github:yvan-sraka/cabal.nix.

The location of your build products will vary depending on which version of cabal-install you use to build; see the documentation section Where are my build products? to find the binary (or just run find -type f -executable -name cabal).

Here are some other useful variations on the commands:

cabal build Cabal # build library only
cabal build Cabal-tests:unit-tests # build Cabal's unit test suite
cabal build cabal-tests # etc...