The stack build tool is a cross-platform program for developing Haskell projects. It is aimed at Haskellers both new and experienced. I recently put together an in-depth guide to using stack for Haskell development.

EDIT The content below is now significantly outdated. We strongly recommend reading the guide on the Stack website.

The official home for this document is in the stack repository. Below is the full text of the guide at the time of writing this blog post. If you have corrections or ideas for improvements, please send edits to the Github repository.

stack is a cross-platform program for developing Haskell projects. This guide is intended to step a new stack user through all of the typical stack workflows. This guide will not teach you Haskell, but will also not be looking at much code. This guide will not presume prior experience with the Haskell packaging system or other build tools.

What is stack?

stack is a modern build tool for Haskell code. It handles the management of your toolchain (including GHC- the Glasgow Haskell Compiler- and- for Windows users- MSYS), building and registering libraries, building build tool dependencies, and much more. While stack can use existing tools on your system, stack has the capability to be your one-stop shop for all Haskell tooling you need. This guide will follow that approach.

What makes stack special? Its primary design point is reproducible builds. The goal is that if you run stack build today, you'll get the same result running stack build tomorrow. There are some exceptions to that rule (changes in your operating system configuration, for example), but overall it follows this design philosophy closely.

stack has also been designed from the ground up to be user friendly, with an intuitive, discoverable command line interface. For many users, simply downloading stack and reading stack --help will be enough to get up and running. This guide is intended to provide a gradual learning process for users who prefer that learning style.

Finally, stack is isolated: it will not make changes outside of specific stack directories (described below). Do not be worried if you see comments like "Installing GHC": stack will not tamper with your system packages at all. Additionally, stack packages will not interfere with packages installed by other build tools like cabal.

NOTE In this guide, I'll be running commands on a Linux system (Ubuntu 14.04, 64-bit) and sharing output from there. Output on other systems- or with different versions of stack- will be slightly different. But all commands work in a cross platform way, unless explicitly stated otherwise.

Downloading

There's a wiki page dedicated to downloading stack which has the most up-to-date information for a variety of operating systems, including multiple Linux flavors. Instead of repeating that content here, please go check out that page and come back here when you can successfully run stack --version. The rest of this session will demonstrate the installation procedure on a vanilla Ubuntu 14.04 machine.

# Starting with a *really* bare machine
michael@d30748af6d3d:~$ sudo apt-get install wget
# Demonstrate that stack really isn't available
michael@d30748af6d3d:~$ stack
-bash: stack: command not found
# Get the signing key for the package repo
michael@d30748af6d3d:~$ wget -q -O- https://s3.amazonaws.com/download.fpcomplete.com/ubuntu/fpco.key | sudo apt-key add -
OK
michael@d30748af6d3d:~$ echo 'deb https://download.fpcomplete.com/ubuntu/trusty stable main'|sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/fpco.list
deb https://download.fpcomplete.com/ubuntu/trusty stable main
michael@d30748af6d3d:~$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install stack -y
# downloading...
michael@d30748af6d3d:~$ stack --version
Version 0.1.3.1, Git revision 908b04205e6f436d4a5f420b1c6c646ed2b804d7

That's it, stack is now up and running, and you're good to go. In addition, it's a good idea- though not required- to set your PATH environment variable to include $HOME/.local/bin:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~$ echo 'export PATH=$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc

Hello World

Now that we've got stack, it's time to put it to work. We'll start off with the stack new command to create a new project. We'll call our project helloworld, and we'll use the new-template project template:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~$ stack new helloworld new-template

You'll see a lot of output since this is your first stack command, and there's quite a bit of initial setup it needs to do, such as downloading the list of packages available upstream. Here's an example of what you may see, though your exact results may vary. Over the course of this guide a lot of the content will begin to make more sense:

Downloading template "new-template" to create project "helloworld" in helloworld/ ...
Using the following authorship configuration:
author-email: [email protected]
author-name: Example Author Name
Copy these to /home/michael/.stack/stack.yaml and edit to use different values.
Writing default config file to: /home/michael/helloworld/stack.yaml
Basing on cabal files:
- /home/michael/helloworld/helloworld.cabal

Downloaded lts-3.2 build plan.
Caching build plan
Fetched package index.
Populated index cache.
Checking against build plan lts-3.2
Selected resolver: lts-3.2
Wrote project config to: /home/michael/helloworld/stack.yaml

Great, we now have a project in the helloworld directory. Let's go in there and have some fun, using the most important stack command: build.

michael@d30748af6d3d:~$ cd helloworld/
michael@d30748af6d3d:~/helloworld$ stack build
No GHC found, expected version 7.10.2 (x86_64) (based on resolver setting in /home/michael/helloworld/stack.yaml).
Try running stack setup

That was a bit anticlimactic. The problem is that stack needs GHC in order to build your project, but we don't have one on our system yet. Instead of automatically assuming you want it to download and install GHC for you, stack asks you to do this as a separate command: setup. Our message here lets us know that stack setup will need to install GHC version 7.10.2. Let's try that out:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/helloworld$ stack setup
Downloaded ghc-7.10.2.
Installed GHC.
stack will use a locally installed GHC
For more information on paths, see 'stack path' and 'stack exec env'
To use this GHC and packages outside of a project, consider using:
stack ghc, stack ghci, stack runghc, or stack exec

It doesn't come through in the output here, but you'll get intermediate download percentage statistics while the download is occurring. This command may take some time, depending on download speeds.

NOTE: GHC gets installed to a stack-specific directory, so calling ghc on the command line won't work. See the stack exec, stack ghc, and stack runghc commands below for more information.

But now that we've got GHC available, stack can build our project:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/helloworld$ stack build
helloworld-0.1.0.0: configure
Configuring helloworld-0.1.0.0...
helloworld-0.1.0.0: build
Preprocessing library helloworld-0.1.0.0...
[1 of 1] Compiling Lib              ( src/Lib.hs, .stack-work/dist/x86_64-linux/Cabal-1.22.4.0/build/Lib.o )
In-place registering helloworld-0.1.0.0...
Preprocessing executable 'helloworld-exe' for helloworld-0.1.0.0...
[1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( app/Main.hs, .stack-work/dist/x86_64-linux/Cabal-1.22.4.0/build/helloworld-exe/helloworld-exe-tmp/Main.o )
Linking .stack-work/dist/x86_64-linux/Cabal-1.22.4.0/build/helloworld-exe/helloworld-exe ...
helloworld-0.1.0.0: install
Installing library in
/home/michael/helloworld/.stack-work/install/x86_64-linux/lts-3.2/7.10.2/lib/x86_64-linux-ghc-7.10.2/helloworld-0.1.0.0-6urpPe0MO7OHasGCFSyIAT
Installing executable(s) in
/home/michael/helloworld/.stack-work/install/x86_64-linux/lts-3.2/7.10.2/bin
Registering helloworld-0.1.0.0...

If you look closely at the output, you can see that it built both a library called "helloworld" and an executable called "helloworld-exe". We'll explain in the next section where this information is defined. For now, though, let's just run our executable (which just outputs the string "someFunc"):

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/helloworld$ stack exec helloworld-exe
someFunc

And finally, like all good software, helloworld actually has a test suite. Let's run it with stack test:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/helloworld$ stack test
NOTE: the test command is functionally equivalent to 'build --test'
helloworld-0.1.0.0: configure (test)
Configuring helloworld-0.1.0.0...
helloworld-0.1.0.0: build (test)
Preprocessing library helloworld-0.1.0.0...
In-place registering helloworld-0.1.0.0...
Preprocessing test suite 'helloworld-test' for helloworld-0.1.0.0...
[1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( test/Spec.hs, .stack-work/dist/x86_64-linux/Cabal-1.22.4.0/build/helloworld-test/helloworld-test-tmp/Main.o )
Linking .stack-work/dist/x86_64-linux/Cabal-1.22.4.0/build/helloworld-test/helloworld-test ...
helloworld-0.1.0.0: test (suite: helloworld-test)
Test suite not yet implemented

Reading the output, you'll see that stack first builds the test suite and then automatically runs it for us. For both the build and test command, already built components are not built again. You can see this by running stack build and stack test a second time:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/helloworld$ stack build
michael@d30748af6d3d:~/helloworld$ stack test
NOTE: the test command is functionally equivalent to 'build --test'
helloworld-0.1.0.0: test (suite: helloworld-test)
Test suite not yet implemented

In the next three subsections, we'll dissect a few details of this helloworld example.

Files in helloworld

Before moving on with understanding stack a bit better, let's understand our project just a bit better.

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/helloworld$ find * -type f
LICENSE
Setup.hs
app/Main.hs
helloworld.cabal
src/Lib.hs
stack.yaml
test/Spec.hs

The app/Main.hs, src/Lib.hs, and test/Spec.hs files are all Haskell source files that compose the actual functionality of our project, and we won't dwell on them too much. Similarly, the LICENSE file has no impact on the build, but is there for informational/legal purposes only. That leaves Setup.hs, helloworld.cabal, and stack.yaml.

The Setup.hs file is a component of the Cabal build system which stack uses. It's technically not needed by stack, but it is still considered good practice in the Haskell world to include it. The file we're using is straight boilerplate:

import Distribution.Simple
main = defaultMain

Next, let's look at our stack.yaml file, which gives our project-level settings:

flags: {}
packages:
- '.'
extra-deps: []
resolver: lts-3.2

If you're familiar with YAML, you'll see that the flags and extra-deps keys have empty values. We'll see more interesting usages for these fields later. Let's focus on the other two fields. packages tells stack which local packages to build. In our simple example, we have just a single package in our project, located in the same directory, so '.' suffices. However, stack has powerful support for multi-package projects, which we'll elaborate on as this guide progresses.

The final field is resolver. This tells stack how to build your package: which GHC version to use, versions of package dependencies, and so on. Our value here says to use LTS Haskell version 3.2, which implies GHC 7.10.2 (which is why stack setup installs that version of GHC). There are a number of values you can use for resolver, which we'll talk about below.

The final file of import is helloworld.cabal. stack is built on top of the Cabal build system. In Cabal, we have individual packages, each of which contains a single .cabal file. The .cabal file can define 1 or more components: a library, executables, test suites, and benchmarks. It also specifies additional information such as library dependencies, default language pragmas, and so on.

In this guide, we'll discuss the bare minimum necessary to understand how to modify a .cabal file. The definitive reference on the .cabal file format is available on haskell.org.

The setup command

As we saw above, the setup command installed GHC for us. Just for kicks, let's run setup a second time:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/helloworld$ stack setup
stack will use a locally installed GHC
For more information on paths, see 'stack path' and 'stack exec env'
To use this GHC and packages outside of a project, consider using:
stack ghc, stack ghci, stack runghc, or stack exec

Thankfully, the command is smart enough to know not to perform an installation twice. setup will take advantage of either the first GHC it finds on your PATH, or a locally installed version. As the command output above indicates, you can use stack path for quite a bit of path information (which we'll play with more later). For now, we'll just look at where GHC is installed:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/helloworld$ stack exec which ghc
/home/michael/.stack/programs/x86_64-linux/ghc-7.10.2/bin/ghc

As you can see from that path, the installation is placed such that it will not interfere with any other GHC installation, either system-wide, or even different GHC versions installed by stack.

The build command

The build command is the heart and soul of stack. It is the engine that powers building your code, testing it, getting dependencies, and more. Quite a bit of the remainder of this guide will cover fun things you can do with build to get more advanced behavior, such as building test and Haddocks at the same time, or constantly rebuilding blocking on file changes.

But on a philosophical note: running the build command twice with the same options and arguments should generally be a no-op (besides things like rerunning test suites), and should in general produce a reproducible result between different runs.

OK, enough talking about this simple example. Let's start making it a bit more complicated!

Adding dependencies

Let's say we decide to modify our helloworld source a bit to use a new library, perhaps the ubiquitous text package. For example:

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}
module Lib
    ( someFunc
    ) where

import qualified Data.Text.IO as T

someFunc :: IO ()
someFunc = T.putStrLn "someFunc"

When we try to build this, things don't go as expected:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/helloworld$ stack build
helloworld-0.1.0.0-c91e853ce4bfbf6d394f54b135573db8: unregistering (local file changes)
helloworld-0.1.0.0: configure
Configuring helloworld-0.1.0.0...
helloworld-0.1.0.0: build
Preprocessing library helloworld-0.1.0.0...

/home/michael/helloworld/src/Lib.hs:6:18:
    Could not find module `Data.Text.IO'
    Use -v to see a list of the files searched for.

--  While building package helloworld-0.1.0.0 using:
      /home/michael/.stack/programs/x86_64-linux/ghc-7.10.2/bin/runhaskell -package=Cabal-1.22.4.0 -clear-package-db -global-package-db -package-db=/home/michael/.stack/snapshots/x86_64-linux/lts-3.2/7.10.2/pkgdb/ /tmp/stack5846/Setup.hs --builddir=.stack-work/dist/x86_64-linux/Cabal-1.22.4.0/ build exe:helloworld-exe --ghc-options -hpcdir .stack-work/dist/x86_64-linux/Cabal-1.22.4.0/hpc/.hpc/ -ddump-hi -ddump-to-file
    Process exited with code: ExitFailure 1

Notice that it says "Could not find module." This means that the package containing the module in question is not available. In order to tell stack that you want to use text, you need to add it to your .cabal file. This can be done in your build-depends section, and looks like this:

library
  hs-source-dirs:      src
  exposed-modules:     Lib
  build-depends:       base >= 4.7 && < 5
                       -- This next line is the new one
                     , text
  default-language:    Haskell2010

Now if we rerun stack build, we get a very different result:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/helloworld$ stack build
text-1.2.1.3: download
text-1.2.1.3: configure
text-1.2.1.3: build
text-1.2.1.3: install
helloworld-0.1.0.0: configure
Configuring helloworld-0.1.0.0...
helloworld-0.1.0.0: build
Preprocessing library helloworld-0.1.0.0...
[1 of 1] Compiling Lib              ( src/Lib.hs, .stack-work/dist/x86_64-linux/Cabal-1.22.4.0/build/Lib.o )
In-place registering helloworld-0.1.0.0...
Preprocessing executable 'helloworld-exe' for helloworld-0.1.0.0...
[1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( app/Main.hs, .stack-work/dist/x86_64-linux/Cabal-1.22.4.0/build/helloworld-exe/helloworld-exe-tmp/Main.o ) [Lib changed]
Linking .stack-work/dist/x86_64-linux/Cabal-1.22.4.0/build/helloworld-exe/helloworld-exe ...
helloworld-0.1.0.0: install
Installing library in
/home/michael/helloworld/.stack-work/install/x86_64-linux/lts-3.2/7.10.2/lib/x86_64-linux-ghc-7.10.2/helloworld-0.1.0.0-HI1deOtDlWiAIDtsSJiOtw
Installing executable(s) in
/home/michael/helloworld/.stack-work/install/x86_64-linux/lts-3.2/7.10.2/bin
Registering helloworld-0.1.0.0...
Completed all 2 actions.

What this output means is: the text package was downloaded, configured, built, and locally installed. Once that was done, we moved on to building our local package (helloworld). Notice that at no point do you need to ask stack to build dependencies for you: it does so automatically.

extra-deps

Let's try a more off-the-beaten-track package: the joke acme-missiles package. Our source code is simple:

module Lib
    ( someFunc
    ) where

import Acme.Missiles

someFunc :: IO ()
someFunc = launchMissiles

As expected, stack build will fail because the module is not available. But if we add acme-missiles to the .cabal file, we get a new error message:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/helloworld$ stack build
While constructing the BuildPlan the following exceptions were encountered:

--  While attempting to add dependency,
    Could not find package acme-missiles in known packages

--  Failure when adding dependencies:
      acme-missiles: needed (-any), latest is 0.3, but not present in build plan
    needed for package: helloworld-0.1.0.0

Recommended action: try adding the following to your extra-deps in /home/michael/helloworld/stack.yaml
- acme-missiles-0.3

You may also want to try the 'stack solver' command

Notice that it says acme-missiles is "not present in build plan." This is the next major topic to understand when using stack.

Curated package sets

Remember up above when stack new selected the lts-3.2 resolver for us? That's what's defining our build plan, and available packages. When we tried using the text package, it just worked, because it was part of the lts-3.2 package set. acme-missiles, on the other hand, is not part of that package set, and therefore building failed.

The first thing you're probably wondering is: how do I fix this? To do so, we'll use another one of the fields in stack.yaml- extra-deps- which is used to define extra dependencies not present in your resolver. With that change, our stack.yaml looks like:

flags: {}
packages:
- '.'
extra-deps:
- acme-missiles-0.3 # Here it is
resolver: lts-3.2

And as expected, stack build succeeds.

With that out of the way, let's dig a little bit more into these package sets, also known as snapshots. We mentioned lts-3.2, and you can get quite a bit of information about it at https://www.stackage.org/lts-3.2:

You can also see a list of all available snapshots. You'll notice two flavors: LTS (standing for Long Term Support) and Nightly. You can read more about them on the LTS Haskell Github page. If you're not sure what to go with, start with LTS Haskell. That's what stack will lean towards by default as well.

Resolvers and changing your compiler version

Now that we know a bit more about package sets, let's try putting that knowledge to work. Instead of lts-3.2, let's change our stack.yaml file to use nightly-2015-08-26. Rerunning stack build will produce:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/helloworld$ stack build
Downloaded nightly-2015-08-26 build plan.
Caching build plan
stm-2.4.4: configure
stm-2.4.4: build
stm-2.4.4: install
acme-missiles-0.3: configure
acme-missiles-0.3: build
acme-missiles-0.3: install
helloworld-0.1.0.0: configure
Configuring helloworld-0.1.0.0...
helloworld-0.1.0.0: build
Preprocessing library helloworld-0.1.0.0...
In-place registering helloworld-0.1.0.0...
Preprocessing executable 'helloworld-exe' for helloworld-0.1.0.0...
Linking .stack-work/dist/x86_64-linux/Cabal-1.22.4.0/build/helloworld-exe/helloworld-exe ...
helloworld-0.1.0.0: install
Installing library in
/home/michael/helloworld/.stack-work/install/x86_64-linux/nightly-2015-08-26/7.10.2/lib/x86_64-linux-ghc-7.10.2/helloworld-0.1.0.0-6cKaFKQBPsi7wB4XdqRv8w
Installing executable(s) in
/home/michael/helloworld/.stack-work/install/x86_64-linux/nightly-2015-08-26/7.10.2/bin
Registering helloworld-0.1.0.0...
Completed all 3 actions.

We can also change resolvers on the command line, which can be useful in a Continuous Integration (CI) setting, like on Travis. For example:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/helloworld$ stack --resolver lts-3.1 build
Downloaded lts-3.1 build plan.
Caching build plan
stm-2.4.4: configure
# Rest is the same, no point copying it

When passed on the command line, you also get some additional "short-cut" versions of resolvers: --resolver nightly will use the newest Nightly resolver available, --resolver lts will use the newest LTS, and --resolver lts-2 will use the newest LTS in the 2.X series. The reason these are only available on the command line and not in your stack.yaml file is that using them:

  1. Will slow your build down, since stack needs to download information on the latest available LTS each time it builds
  2. Produces unreliable results, since a build run today may proceed differently tomorrow because of changes outside of your control.

Changing GHC versions

Finally, let's try using an older LTS snapshot. We'll use the newest 2.X snapshot:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/helloworld$ stack --resolver lts-2 build
Selected resolver: lts-2.22
Downloaded lts-2.22 build plan.
Caching build plan
No GHC found, expected version 7.8.4 (x86_64) (based on resolver setting in /home/michael/helloworld/stack.yaml). Try running stack setup

This fails, because GHC 7.8.4 (which lts-2.22 uses) is not available on our system. The first lesson is: when you want to change your GHC version, modify the resolver value. Now the question is: how do we get the right GHC version? One answer is to use stack setup like we did above, this time with the --resolver lts-2 option. However, there's another way worth mentioning: the --install-ghc flag.

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/helloworld$ stack --resolver lts-2 --install-ghc build
Selected resolver: lts-2.22
Downloaded ghc-7.8.4.
Installed GHC.
stm-2.4.4: configure
# Mostly same as before, nothing interesting to see

What's nice about --install-ghc is that:

  1. You don't need to have an extra step in your build script
  2. It only requires downloading the information on latest snapshots once

As mentioned above, the default behavior of stack is to not install new versions of GHC automatically, to avoid surprising users with large downloads/installs. This flag simply changes that default behavior.

Other resolver values

We've mentioned nightly-YYYY-MM-DD and lts-X.Y values for the resolver. There are actually other options available, and the list will grow over time. At the time of writing:

The most up-to-date information can always be found on the stack.yaml wiki page.

Existing projects

Alright, enough playing around with simple projects. Let's take an open source package and try to build it. We'll be ambitious and use yackage, a local package server using Yesod. To get the code, we'll use the stack unpack command:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~$ stack unpack yackage-0.8.0
yackage-0.8.0: download
Unpacked yackage-0.8.0 to /home/michael/yackage-0.8.0/
michael@d30748af6d3d:~$ cd yackage-0.8.0/

This new directory does not have a stack.yaml file, so we need to make one first. We could do it by hand, but let's be lazy instead with the stack init command:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/yackage-0.8.0$ stack init
Writing default config file to: /home/michael/yackage-0.8.0/stack.yaml
Basing on cabal files:
- /home/michael/yackage-0.8.0/yackage.cabal

Checking against build plan lts-3.2
Selected resolver: lts-3.2
Wrote project config to: /home/michael/yackage-0.8.0/stack.yaml
michael@d30748af6d3d:~/yackage-0.8.0$ cat stack.yaml
flags:
  yackage:
    upload: true
packages:
- '.'
extra-deps: []
resolver: lts-3.2

stack init does quite a few things for you behind the scenes:

Assuming it finds a match, it will write your stack.yaml file, and everything will be good. Given that LTS Haskell and Stackage Nightly have ~1400 of the most common Haskell packages, this will often be enough. However, let's simulate a failure by adding acme-missiles to our build-depends and re-initing:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/yackage-0.8.0$ stack init --force
Writing default config file to: /home/michael/yackage-0.8.0/stack.yaml
Basing on cabal files:
- /home/michael/yackage-0.8.0/yackage.cabal

Checking against build plan lts-3.2

* Build plan did not match your requirements:
    acme-missiles not found
    - yackage requires -any

Checking against build plan lts-3.1

* Build plan did not match your requirements:
    acme-missiles not found
    - yackage requires -any


Checking against build plan nightly-2015-08-26

* Build plan did not match your requirements:
    acme-missiles not found
    - yackage requires -any


Checking against build plan lts-2.22

* Build plan did not match your requirements:
    acme-missiles not found
    - yackage requires -any

    warp version 3.0.13.1 found
    - yackage requires >=3.1


There was no snapshot found that matched the package bounds in your .cabal files.
Please choose one of the following commands to get started.

    stack init --resolver lts-3.2
    stack init --resolver lts-3.1
    stack init --resolver nightly-2015-08-26
    stack init --resolver lts-2.22

You'll then need to add some extra-deps. See:

    https://github.com/commercialhaskell/stack/wiki/stack.yaml#extra-deps

You can also try falling back to a dependency solver with:

    stack init --solver

stack has tested four different snapshots, and in every case discovered that acme-missiles is not available. Also, when testing lts-2.22, it found that the warp version provided was too old for yackage. The question is: what do we do next?

The recommended approach is: pick a resolver, and fix the problem. Again, following the advice mentioned above, default to LTS if you don't have a preference. In this case, the newest LTS listed is lts-3.2. Let's pick that. stack has told us the correct command to do this. We'll just remove our old stack.yaml first and then run it:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/yackage-0.8.0$ rm stack.yaml
michael@d30748af6d3d:~/yackage-0.8.0$ stack init --resolver lts-3.2
Writing default config file to: /home/michael/yackage-0.8.0/stack.yaml
Basing on cabal files:
- /home/michael/yackage-0.8.0/yackage.cabal

Checking against build plan lts-3.2

* Build plan did not match your requirements:
    acme-missiles not found
    - yackage requires -any


Selected resolver: lts-3.2
Wrote project config to: /home/michael/yackage-0.8.0/stack.yaml

As you may guess, stack build will now fail due to the missing acme-missiles. Toward the end of the error message, it says the familiar:

Recommended action: try adding the following to your extra-deps in /home/michael/yackage-0.8.0/stack.yaml
- acme-missiles-0.3

If you're following along at home, try making the necessary stack.yaml modification to get things building.

Alternative solution: dependency solving

There's another solution to the problem you may consider. At the very end of the previous error message, it said:

You may also want to try the 'stack solver' command

This approach uses a full blown dependency solver to look at all upstream package versions available and compare them to your snapshot selection and version ranges in your .cabal file. In order to use this feature, you'll need the cabal executable available. Let's build that with:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/yackage-0.8.0$ stack build cabal-install
random-1.1: download
mtl-2.2.1: download
network-2.6.2.1: download
old-locale-1.0.0.7: download
random-1.1: configure
random-1.1: build
# ...
cabal-install-1.22.6.0: download
cabal-install-1.22.6.0: configure
cabal-install-1.22.6.0: build
cabal-install-1.22.6.0: install
Completed all 10 actions.

Now we can use stack solver:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/yackage-0.8.0$ stack solver
This command is not guaranteed to give you a perfect build plan
It's possible that even with the changes generated below, you will still need to do some manual tweaking
Asking cabal to calculate a build plan, please wait
extra-deps:
- acme-missiles-0.3

And if we're exceptionally lazy, we can ask stack to modify our stack.yaml file for us:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/yackage-0.8.0$ stack solver --modify-stack-yaml
This command is not guaranteed to give you a perfect build plan
It's possible that even with the changes generated below, you will still need to do some manual tweaking
Asking cabal to calculate a build plan, please wait
extra-deps:
- acme-missiles-0.3
Updated /home/michael/yackage-0.8.0/stack.yaml

With that change, stack build will now run.

NOTE: You should probably back up your stack.yaml before doing this, such as committing to Git/Mercurial/Darcs.

There's one final approach to mention: skipping the snapshot entirely and just using dependency solving. You can do this with the --solver flag to init. This is not a commonly used workflow with stack, as you end up with a large number of extra-deps, and no guarantee that the packages will compile together. For those interested, however, the option is available. You need to make sure you have both the ghc and cabal commands on your PATH. An easy way to do this is to use the stack exec command:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/yackage-0.8.0$ stack exec --no-ghc-package-path -- stack init --solver --force
Writing default config file to: /home/michael/yackage-0.8.0/stack.yaml
Basing on cabal files:
- /home/michael/yackage-0.8.0/yackage.cabal

Asking cabal to calculate a build plan, please wait
Selected resolver: ghc-7.10
Wrote project config to: /home/michael/yackage-0.8.0/stack.yaml

The --no-ghc-package-path flag is described below, and is only needed due to a bug in the currently released stack. That bug is fixed in 0.1.4 and forward.

Different databases

Time to take a short break from hands-on examples and discuss a little architecture. stack has the concept of multiple databases. A database consists of a GHC package database (which contains the compiled version of a library), executables, and a few other things as well. Just to give you an idea:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/helloworld$ ls .stack-work/install/x86_64-linux/lts-3.2/7.10.2/
bin  doc  flag-cache  lib  pkgdb

Databases in stack are layered. For example, the database listing I just gave is what we call a local database. This is layered on top of a snapshot database, which contains the libraries and executables specified in the snapshot itself. Finally, GHC itself ships with a number of libraries and executables, which forms the global database. Just to give a quick idea of this, we can look at the output of the ghc-pkg list command in our helloworld project:

/home/michael/.stack/programs/x86_64-linux/ghc-7.10.2/lib/ghc-7.10.2/package.conf.d
   Cabal-1.22.4.0
   array-0.5.1.0
   base-4.8.1.0
   bin-package-db-0.0.0.0
   binary-0.7.5.0
   bytestring-0.10.6.0
   containers-0.5.6.2
   deepseq-1.4.1.1
   directory-1.2.2.0
   filepath-1.4.0.0
   ghc-7.10.2
   ghc-prim-0.4.0.0
   haskeline-0.7.2.1
   hoopl-3.10.0.2
   hpc-0.6.0.2
   integer-gmp-1.0.0.0
   pretty-1.1.2.0
   process-1.2.3.0
   rts-1.0
   template-haskell-2.10.0.0
   terminfo-0.4.0.1
   time-1.5.0.1
   transformers-0.4.2.0
   unix-2.7.1.0
   xhtml-3000.2.1
/home/michael/.stack/snapshots/x86_64-linux/nightly-2015-08-26/7.10.2/pkgdb
   stm-2.4.4
/home/michael/helloworld/.stack-work/install/x86_64-linux/nightly-2015-08-26/7.10.2/pkgdb
   acme-missiles-0.3
   helloworld-0.1.0.0

Notice that acme-missiles ends up in the local database. Anything which is not installed from a snapshot ends up in the local database. This includes: your own code, extra-deps, and in some cases even snapshot packages, if you modify them in some way. The reason we have this structure is that:

Typically, the process by which a snapshot package is marked as modified is referred to as "promoting to an extra-dep," meaning we treat it just like a package in the extra-deps section. This happens for a variety of reasons, including:

And as you probably guessed: there are multiple snapshot databases available, e.g.:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/helloworld$ ls ~/.stack/snapshots/x86_64-linux/
lts-2.22  lts-3.1  lts-3.2  nightly-2015-08-26

These databases don't get layered on top of each other, but are each used separately.

In reality, you'll rarely- if ever- interact directly with these databases, but it's good to have a basic understanding of how they work so you can understand why rebuilding may occur at different points.

The build synonyms

Let me show you a subset of the stack --help output:

build    Build the project(s) in this directory/configuration
install  Shortcut for 'build --copy-bins'
test     Shortcut for 'build --test'
bench    Shortcut for 'build --bench'
haddock  Shortcut for 'build --haddock'

It's important to note that four of these commands are just synonyms for the build command. They are provided for convenience for common cases (e.g., stack test instead of stack build --test) and so that commonly expected commands just work.

What's so special about these commands being synonyms? It allows us to make much more composable command lines. For example, we can have a command that builds executables, generates Haddock documentation (Haskell API-level docs), and builds and runs your test suites, with:

stack build --haddock --test

You can even get more inventive as you learn about other flags. For example, take the following:

stack build --pedantic --haddock --test --exec "echo Yay, it succeeded" --file-watch

This will:

install and copy-bins

It's worth calling out the behavior of the install command and --copy-bins option, since this has confused a number of users, especially when compared to behavior of other tools (e.g., cabal-install). The install command does precisely one thing in addition to the build command: it copies any generated executables to the local bin path. You may recognize the default value for that path:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/helloworld$ stack path --local-bin-path
/home/michael/.local/bin

That's why the download page recommends adding that directory to your PATH environment variable. This feature is convenient, because now you can simply run executable-name in your shell instead of having to run stack exec executable-name from inside your project directory.

Since it's such a point of confusion, let me list a number of things stack does not do specially for the install command:

That's really all there is to the install command: for the simplicity of what it does, it occupies a much larger mental space than is warranted.

Targets, locals, and extra-deps

We haven't discussed this too much yet, but in addition to having a number of synonyms, and taking a number of options on the command line, the build command also takes many arguments. These are parsed in different ways, and can be used to achieve a high level of flexibility in telling stack exactly what you want to build.

We're not going to cover the full generality of these arguments here; instead, there's a Wiki page covering the full build command syntax. Instead, let me point out a few different types of arguments:

When you give no specific arguments on the command line (e.g., stack build), it's the same as specifying the names of all of your local packages. If you just want to build the package for the directory you're currently in, you can use stack build ..

Components, --test, and --bench

Here's one final important yet subtle point. Consider our helloworld package, which has a library component, an executable helloworld-exe, and a test suite helloworld-test. When you run stack build helloworld, how does it know which ones to build? By default, it will build the library (if any) and all of the executables, but ignore the test suites and benchmarks.

This is where the --test and --bench flags come into play. If you use them, those components will also be included. So stack build --test helloworld will end up including the helloworld-test component as well.

You can bypass this implicit adding of components by being much more explicit, and stating the components directly. For example, the following will not build the helloworld-exe executable:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/helloworld$ stack clean
michael@d30748af6d3d:~/helloworld$ stack build :helloworld-test
helloworld-0.1.0.0: configure (test)
Configuring helloworld-0.1.0.0...
helloworld-0.1.0.0: build (test)
Preprocessing library helloworld-0.1.0.0...
[1 of 1] Compiling Lib              ( src/Lib.hs, .stack-work/dist/x86_64-linux/Cabal-1.22.4.0/build/Lib.o )
In-place registering helloworld-0.1.0.0...
Preprocessing test suite 'helloworld-test' for helloworld-0.1.0.0...
[1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( test/Spec.hs, .stack-work/dist/x86_64-linux/Cabal-1.22.4.0/build/helloworld-test/helloworld-test-tmp/Main.o )
Linking .stack-work/dist/x86_64-linux/Cabal-1.22.4.0/build/helloworld-test/helloworld-test ...
helloworld-0.1.0.0: test (suite: helloworld-test)
Test suite not yet implemented

We first cleaned our project to clear old results so we know exactly what stack is trying to do. Notice that it builds the helloworld-test test suite, and the helloworld library (since it's used by the test suite), but it does not build the helloworld-exe executable.

And now the final point: the last line shows that our command also runs the test suite it just built. This may surprise some people who would expect tests to only be run when using stack test, but this design decision is what allows the stack build command to be as composable as it is (as described previously). The same rule applies to benchmarks. To spell it out completely:

You can use the --no-run-tests and --no-run-benchmarks (from stack-0.1.4.0 and on) flags to disable running of these components. You can also use --no-rerun-tests to prevent running a test suite which has already passed and has not changed.

NOTE: stack doesn't build or run test suites and benchmarks for non-local packages. This is done so that running a command like stack test doesn't need to run 200 test suites!

Multi-package projects

Until now, everything we've done with stack has used a single-package project. However, stack's power truly shines when you're working on multi-package projects. All the functionality you'd expect to work just does: dependencies between packages are detected and respected, dependencies of all packages are just as one cohesive whole, and if anything fails to build, the build commands exits appropriately.

Let's demonstrate this with the wai-app-static and yackage packages:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~$ mkdir multi
michael@d30748af6d3d:~$ cd multi/
michael@d30748af6d3d:~/multi$ stack unpack wai-app-static-3.1.1 yackage-0.8.0
wai-app-static-3.1.1: download
Unpacked wai-app-static-3.1.1 to /home/michael/multi/wai-app-static-3.1.1/
Unpacked yackage-0.8.0 to /home/michael/multi/yackage-0.8.0/
michael@d30748af6d3d:~/multi$ stack init
Writing default config file to: /home/michael/multi/stack.yaml
Basing on cabal files:
- /home/michael/multi/yackage-0.8.0/yackage.cabal
- /home/michael/multi/wai-app-static-3.1.1/wai-app-static.cabal

Checking against build plan lts-3.2
Selected resolver: lts-3.2
Wrote project config to: /home/michael/multi/stack.yaml
michael@d30748af6d3d:~/multi$ stack build --haddock --test
# Goes off to build a whole bunch of packages

If you look at the stack.yaml, you'll see exactly what you'd expect:

flags:
  yackage:
    upload: true
  wai-app-static:
    print: false
packages:
- yackage-0.8.0/
- wai-app-static-3.1.1/
extra-deps: []
resolver: lts-3.2

Notice that multiple directories are listed in the packages key.

In addition to local directories, you can also refer to packages available in a Git repository or in a tarball over HTTP/HTTPS. This can be useful for using a modified version of a dependency that hasn't yet been released upstream. This is a slightly more advanced usage that we won't go into detail with here, but it's covered in the stack.yaml wiki page.

Flags and GHC options

There are two common ways you may wish to alter how a package will install: with Cabal flags and GHC options. In the stack.yaml file above, you can see that stack init has detected that- for the yackage package- the upload flag can be set to true, and for wai-app-static, the print flag to false. (The reason it's chosen those values is that they're the default flag values, and their dependencies are compatible with the snapshot we're using.)

In order to change this, we can use the command line --flag option:

stack build --flag yackage:-upload

This means: when compiling the yackage package, turn off the upload flag (thus the -). Unlike other tools, stack is explicit about which package's flag you want to change. It does this for two reasons:

  1. There's no global meaning for Cabal flags, and therefore two packages can use the same flag name for completely different things.
  2. By following this approach, we can avoid unnecessarily recompiling snapshot packages that happen to use a flag that we're using.

You can also change flag values on the command line for extra-dep and snapshot packages. If you do this, that package will automatically be promoted to an extra-dep, since the build plan is different than what the plan snapshot definition would entail.

GHC options

GHC options follow a similar logic, with a few nuances to adjust for common use cases. Let's consider:

stack build --ghc-options="-Wall -Werror"

This will set the -Wall -Werror options for all local targets. The important thing to note here is that it will not affect extra-dep and snapshot packages at all. This is by design, once again, to get reproducible and fast builds.

(By the way: that above GHC options have a special convenience flag: --pedantic.)

There's one extra nuance about command line GHC options. Since they only apply to local targets, if you change your local targets, they will no longer apply to other packages. Let's play around with an example from the wai repository, which includes the wai and warp packages, the latter depending on the former. If we run:

stack build --ghc-options=-O0 wai

It will build all of the dependencies of wai, and then build wai with all optimizations disabled. Now let's add in warp as well:

stack build --ghc-options=-O0 wai warp

This builds the additional dependencies for warp, and then builds warp with optimizations disabled. Importantly: it does not rebuild wai, since wai's configuration has not been altered. Now the surprising case:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/wai$ stack build --ghc-options=-O0 warp
wai-3.0.3.0-5a49351d03cba6cbaf906972d788e65d: unregistering (flags changed from ["--ghc-options","-O0"] to [])
warp-3.1.3-a91c7c3108f63376877cb3cd5dbe8a7a: unregistering (missing dependencies: wai)
wai-3.0.3.0: configure

You may expect this to be a no-op: neither wai nor warp has changed. However, stack will instead recompile wai with optimizations enabled again, and then rebuild warp (with optimizations disabled) against this newly built wai. The reason: reproducible builds. If we'd never built wai or warp before, trying to build warp would necessitate building all of its dependencies, and it would do so with default GHC options (optimizations enabled). This dependency would include wai. So when we run:

stack build --ghc-options=-O0 warp

We want its behavior to be unaffected by any previous build steps we took. While this specific corner case does catch people by surprise, the overall goal of reproducible builds is- in the stack maintainers' views- worth the confusion.

Final point: if you have GHC options that you'll be regularly passing to your packages, you can add them to your stack.yaml file (starting with stack-0.1.4.0). See the wiki page section on ghc-options for more information.

path

NOTE: That's it, the heavy content of this guide is done! Everything from here on out is simple explanations of commands. Congratulations!

Generally, you don't need to worry about where stack stores various files. But some people like to know this stuff. That's when the stack path command is useful.

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/wai$ stack path
global-stack-root: /home/michael/.stack
project-root: /home/michael/wai
config-location: /home/michael/wai/stack.yaml
bin-path: /home/michael/.stack/snapshots/x86_64-linux/lts-2.17/7.8.4/bin:/home/michael/.stack/programs/x86_64-linux/ghc-7.8.4/bin:/home/michael/.stack/programs/x86_64-linux/ghc-7.10.2/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin
ghc-paths: /home/michael/.stack/programs/x86_64-linux
local-bin-path: /home/michael/.local/bin
extra-include-dirs:
extra-library-dirs:
snapshot-pkg-db: /home/michael/.stack/snapshots/x86_64-linux/lts-2.17/7.8.4/pkgdb
local-pkg-db: /home/michael/wai/.stack-work/install/x86_64-linux/lts-2.17/7.8.4/pkgdb
snapshot-install-root: /home/michael/.stack/snapshots/x86_64-linux/lts-2.17/7.8.4
local-install-root: /home/michael/wai/.stack-work/install/x86_64-linux/lts-2.17/7.8.4
snapshot-doc-root: /home/michael/.stack/snapshots/x86_64-linux/lts-2.17/7.8.4/doc
local-doc-root: /home/michael/wai/.stack-work/install/x86_64-linux/lts-2.17/7.8.4/doc
dist-dir: .stack-work/dist/x86_64-linux/Cabal-1.18.1.5

In addition, this command accepts command line arguments to state which of these keys you're interested in, which can be convenient for scripting. As a simple example, let's find out which versions of GHC are installed locally:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~/wai$ ls $(stack path --ghc-paths)/*.installed
/home/michael/.stack/programs/x86_64-linux/ghc-7.10.2.installed
/home/michael/.stack/programs/x86_64-linux/ghc-7.8.4.installed

(Yes, that command requires a *nix shell, and likely won't run on Windows.)

While we're talking about paths, it's worth explaining how to wipe our stack completely. It involves deleting just three things:

  1. The stack executable itself
  2. The stack root, e.g. $HOME/.stack on non-Windows systems. See stack path --global-stack-root
    • On Windows, you will also need to delete stack path --ghc-paths
  3. Any local .stack-work directories inside a project

exec

We've already used stack exec used multiple times in this guide. As you've likely already guessed, it allows you to run executables, but with a slightly modified environment. In particular: it looks for executables on stack's bin paths, and sets a few additional environment variables (like GHC_PACKAGE_PATH, which tells GHC which package databases to use). If you want to see exactly what the modified environment looks like, try:

stack exec env

The only trick is how to distinguish flags to be passed to stack versus those for the underlying program. Thanks to the optparse-applicative library, stack follows the Unix convention of -- to separate these, e.g.:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~$ stack exec --package stm -- echo I installed the stm package via --package stm
Run from outside a project, using implicit global config
Using latest snapshot resolver: lts-3.2
Writing global (non-project-specific) config file to: /home/michael/.stack/global/stack.yaml
Note: You can change the snapshot via the resolver field there.
I installed the stm package via --package stm

Flags worth mentioning:

ghci (the repl)

GHCi is the interactive GHC environment, a.k.a. the REPL. You can access it with:

stack exec ghci

However, this doesn't do anything particularly intelligent, such as loading up locally written modules. For that reason, the stack ghci command is available.

NOTE: At the time of writing, stack ghci was still an experimental feature, so I'm not going to devote a lot more time to it. Future readers: feel free to expand this!

ghc/runghc

You'll sometimes want to just compile (or run) a single Haskell source file, instead of creating an entire Cabal package for it. You can use stack exec ghc or stack exec runghc for that. As simple helpers, we also provide the stack ghc and stack runghc commands, for these common cases.

stack also offers a very useful feature for running files: a script interpreter. For too long have Haskellers felt shackled to bash or Python because it's just too hard to create reusable source-only Haskell scripts. stack attempts to solve that. An example will be easiest to understand:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~$ cat turtle.hs
#!/usr/bin/env stack
-- stack --resolver lts-3.2 --install-ghc runghc --package turtle
{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}
import Turtle
main = echo "Hello World!"
michael@d30748af6d3d:~$ chmod +x turtle.hs
michael@d30748af6d3d:~$ ./turtle.hs
Run from outside a project, using implicit global config
Using resolver: lts-3.2 specified on command line
hashable-1.2.3.3: configure
# installs some more dependencies
Completed all 22 actions.
Hello World!
michael@d30748af6d3d:~$ ./turtle.hs
Run from outside a project, using implicit global config
Using resolver: lts-3.2 specified on command line
Hello World!

If you're on Windows: you can run stack turtle.hs instead of ./turtle.hs.

The first line is the usual "shebang" to use stack as a script interpreter. The second line, which is required, provides additional options to stack (due to the common limitation of the "shebang" line only being allowed a single argument). In this case, the options tell stack to use the lts-3.2 resolver, automatically install GHC if it is not already installed, and ensure the turtle package is available.

The first run can take a while, since it has to download GHC and build dependencies. But subsequent runs are able to reuse everything already built, and are therefore quite fast.

Finding project configs, and the implicit global

Whenever you run something with stack, it needs a stack.yaml project file. The algorithm stack uses to find this is:

  1. Check for a --stack-yaml option on the command line
  2. Check for a STACK_YAML environment variable
  3. Check the current directory and all ancestor directories for a stack.yaml file

The first two provide a convenient method for using an alternate configuration. For example: stack build --stack-yaml stack-7.8.yaml can be used by your CI system to check your code against GHC 7.8. Setting the STACK_YAML environment variable can be convenient if you're going to be running commands like stack ghc in other directories, but you want to use the configuration you defined in a specific project.

If stack does not find a stack.yaml in any of the three specified locations, the implicit global logic kicks in. You've probably noticed that phrase a few times in the output from commands above. Implicit global is essentially a hack to allow stack to be useful in a non-project setting. When no implicit global config file exists, stack creates one for you with the latest LTS snapshot as the resolver. This allows you to do things like:

Keep in mind that there's nothing magical about this implicit global configuration. It has no impact on projects at all, and every package you install with it is put into isolated databases just like everywhere else. The only magic is that it's the catch-all project whenever you're running stack somewhere else.

stack.yaml vs .cabal files

Now that we've covered a lot of stack use cases, this quick summary of stack.yaml vs .cabal files will hopefully make a lot of sense, and be a good reminder for future uses of stack:

Comparison to other tools

stack is not the only tool around for building Haskell code. stack came into existence due to limitations with some of the existing tools. If you're unaffected by those limitations and are happily building Haskell code, you may not need stack. If you're suffering from some of the common problems in other tools, give stack a try instead.

If you're a new user who has no experience with other tools, you should start with stack. The defaults match modern best practices in Haskell development, and there are less corner cases you need to be aware of. You can develop Haskell code with other tools, but you probably want to spend your time writing code, not convincing a tool to do what you want.

Before jumping into the differences, let me clarify an important similarity:

Now the differences:

More resources

There are lots of resources available for learning more about stack:

Fun features

This is just a quick collection of fun and useful feature stack supports.

Templates

We started off using the new command to create a project. stack provides multiple templates to start a new project from:

michael@d30748af6d3d:~$ stack templates
chrisdone
hakyll-template
new-template
simple
yesod-minimal
yesod-mongo
yesod-mysql
yesod-postgres
yesod-postgres-fay
yesod-simple
yesod-sqlite
michael@d30748af6d3d:~$ stack new my-yesod-project yesod-simple
Downloading template "yesod-simple" to create project "my-yesod-project" in my-yesod-project/ ...
Using the following authorship configuration:
author-email: [email protected]
author-name: Example Author Name
Copy these to /home/michael/.stack/stack.yaml and edit to use different values.
Writing default config file to: /home/michael/my-yesod-project/stack.yaml
Basing on cabal files:
- /home/michael/my-yesod-project/my-yesod-project.cabal

Checking against build plan lts-3.2
Selected resolver: lts-3.2
Wrote project config to: /home/michael/my-yesod-project/stack.yaml

To add more templates, see the stack-templates repository.

IDE

stack has a work-in-progress suite of editor integrations, to do things like getting type information in emacs. For more information, see stack-ide.

Visualizing dependencies

If you'd like to get some insight into the dependency tree of your packages, you can use the stack dot command and Graphviz. More information is available on the wiki.

Travis with caching

Many people use Travis CI to test out a project for every Git push. We have a Wiki page devoted to Travis. However, for most people, the following example will be sufficient to get started:

sudo: false
language: c

addons:
  apt:
    packages:
    - libgmp-dev

before_install:
# stack
- mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
- export PATH=$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH
- travis_retry curl -L https://github.com/commercialhaskell/stack/releases/download/v0.1.3.1/stack-0.1.3.1-x86_64-linux.gz | gunzip > ~/.local/bin/stack
- chmod a+x ~/.local/bin/stack

script:
- stack --no-terminal setup
- stack --no-terminal build
- stack --no-terminal test

cache:
  directories:
  - $HOME/.stack

Not only will this build and test your project, but it will cache your snapshot built packages, meaning that subsequent builds will be much faster.

Two notes for future improvement:

If you're wondering: the reason we need --no-terminal is because stack does some fancy sticky display on smart terminals to give nicer status and progress messages, and the terminal detection is broken on Travis.

Shell autocompletion

Love being able to tab-complete commands? You're not alone. If you're on bash, just run the following (or add it to .bashrc):

eval "$(stack --bash-completion-script "$(which stack)")"

For more information and other shells, see the Shell autocompletion wiki page

Docker

stack provides two built-in Docker integrations. Firstly, you can build your code inside a Docker image, which means:

For more information, see the Docker wiki page.

The other integration is that stack can generate Docker images for you containing your built executables. This feature is great for automating deployments from CI. This feature is not yet very well documented, but the basics are to add a section like the following to stack.yaml:

image:
  container:
    base: "fpco/ubuntu-with-libgmp:14.04"
    add:
      man/: /usr/local/share/man/
    entrypoints:
      - stack

and then run stack image container.

Power user commands

The following commands are a little more powerful, and therefore won't be needed by all users. Here's a quick rundown:

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