andgate / ghcide-starter

Starter project that provides a nix shell for developing with ghcide and cabal

ghcide Starter Project

This starter project for ghcide uses nix to provide a local shell environment with:

• niv
• ghcide
• cabal-install
• hlint
• stylish-cabal
• stylish-haskell
• pointfree/pointful

A pre-made cabal project is included with a sample library, binary, and test-suite. The test suite is a simple tasty example using hunit and smallcheck. The project is licensed as MIT. I encourage people to use MIT's permissive license for open source software, but feel free to use any license you want.

Setup

Project Structure

The project is structured as follows

  bin/                      - executable source files
  nix/                      - nix files and niv version pinning
      /nixpkgs.nix          - Custom nixpkgs for project
      /sources.json         - (autogenerated) niv sources metadata
      /source.nix           - (autogenerated) version pinned nix projects via niv 
  src/                      - library source files
  test/                     - test-suite source files
  .gitignore                - tells git ot ignore artifacts produced by cabal, nix, and vscode
  .hlint.yaml               - Default hlint config
  .stylish-haskell.yaml     - Default 
  CHANGELOG.md              - changelog generated by cabal
  default.nix               - release package for nix
  ghcide-starter.cabal      - cabal Project file
  hie.yaml                  - hie configuration for ghcide
  LICENSE                   - MIT project license
  README.md                 - this document
  shell.nix                 - nix shell configuration with ghcide support

Steps

Search through the project and replace "ghcide-starter" with your project's name. The files that need editing are

• CHANGELOG.md

  • Replace ghcide-starter with your project's name

• default.nix

  • Replace ghcide-starter with your project's name

• ghcide-starter.cabal

  • Author/maintainer fields
  • the executable is named myapp
  • the test suite is named mytest
  • the executable depends on ghcide-starter

• hie.yaml

  • Replace ghcide-starter with your project's name

• LICENSE

  • fill out <YEAR> and <NAME>

• nix/nixpkgs.nix

  • replace the ghcide-starter haskell package override with the your project's name

• README.md

  • Write your own!

• shell.nix

  • Replace all instances of ghcide-starter with your project's name
  • Add additional build tools to buildInputs

Recommend Visual Studio Code Plugins

This project works exceptionally well with the following vscode plugins

• Nix Environment Selector by Roman Valihura

• ghcide by Digital Asset Holdings LLC

• Haskell Syntax Highlighting by Justus Adam

• Nix by Baptist BENOIST

• pointfree by JoseDanielD

• stylish-haskell by Daniel Vigovszky

Unfortunately, the hlint plugin for vscode is severely outdated and unmaintained. However, there is talk of integrating hlint directly into ghcide.