Installing GHC and Cabal under the home directory

install-ghc-cabal.md

Installing GHC and Cabal under the home directory

1. Install libgmp-dev libgmp3c2 or equivalent using the system package manager.
2. Add export PATH="$HOME/.ghc/bin:$HOME/.cabal/bin:$PATH" to your .<shell>rc.
3. Also run the command above now.
4. Get the GHC binary tarball and extract it.
5. ./configure --prefix="$HOME/.ghc" && make install
6. Get the cabal-install source tarball and extract it.
7. EXTRA_CONFIGURE_OPTS=-p sh bootstrap.sh
8. cabal update
9. Add library-profiling: True and documentation: True to ~/.cabal/config.

Purging both from the system

1. rm -fr ~/.ghc ~/.cabal
2. Remove the export PATH… line from your .<shell>rc.

This works for older versions of cabal (I used it for 1.22.9.0), but newer versions lack the bootstrap.sh. Luckily that was exactly what I needed for my incomplete 8.2.2 setup!