Recently, I have tried to learn more about how use Nix to manage a Haskell project. One big project/package that uses Nix is Reflex. I wanted to do something in it, but it is not easily available through Stackage, so I couldn’t use Stack to start something new in it. At least, not in the simple way I know of.
So, I tried looking around to see how to start a project managed by Nix.
I found this article with instructions on how to setup a project that uses hpack, and used that as a starting point for my setup. When trying to enter a shell with the ghcjs compiler, I’d stumble upon various test errors of packages like Glob and hourglass. I started to disable those tests with the haskell.lib.dontCheck modifier as each failure occurred. This attempt can be seen at ./default_old.nix .
Around the same time, I discovered this excellent article which showed how to do (almost) the same thing that I wanted. But the author of that article used only Cabal, and I wanted to use hpack, which I was more used to and has very nice ergonomics. So I tried to combine the first and second article approaches to achieve this.
Again, I stumbled upon the test errors from the first approach, and noticed that those errors actually originated from using hpack instead of only Cabal. I just kept ignoring the failing tests as they came up until I could successfully enter a Nix shell. The final default.nix file I ended up with was:
{ pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> {}
, reflex-platform ? import ./nix/reflex-platform.nix
, compiler ? "ghcjs"
}:
reflex-platform.project (_: {
withHoogle = false;
useWarp = true;
packages = {
reflex-skeleton = ./.;
};
overrides = self: super:
let
inherit (pkgs.lib.lists) fold;
in
fold (broken-test-pkg: acc:
acc // { ${broken-test-pkg} = pkgs.haskell.lib.dontCheck super.${broken-test-pkg}; }
)
{} [ "Glob"
"hourglass"
"unliftio"
"x509"
"x509-validation"
"tls"
"mono-traversable"
"conduit"
"yaml"
"hpack"
];
shells = {
ghc = ["reflex-skeleton"];
ghcjs = ["reflex-skeleton"];
};
})Inside the shell, I could confirm that Reflex and Reflex.Dom were accessible:
$ hpack
$ cabal update
$ cabal new-configure
$ cabal new-repl
Build profile: -w ghc-8.6.5 -O1
In order, the following will be built (use -v for more details):
- reflex-skeleton-0.0.0.0 (exe:reflex-skeleton) (configuration changed)
Configuring executable 'reflex-skeleton' for reflex-skeleton-0.0.0.0..
Preprocessing executable 'reflex-skeleton' for reflex-skeleton-0.0.0.0..
GHCi, version 8.6.5: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ :? for help
Loaded GHCi configuration from /home/thales/.ghci
[1 of 2] Compiling Main ( app/Main.hs, interpreted )
[2 of 2] Compiling Paths_reflex_skeleton ( /home/thales/dev/haskell/reflex-skeleton/dist-newstyle/build/x86_64-linux/ghc-8.6.5/reflex-skeleton-0.0.0.0/x/reflex-skeleton/build/reflex-skeleton/autogen/Paths_reflex_skeleton.hs, interpreted )
Ok, two modules loaded.
> import Reflex
> import Reflex.Dom
> :t mainWidget
mainWidget :: (forall x. Widget x ()) -> IO ()Success!! 🍻
I had noticed previously while following along with the Reflex tutorial from QFPL that Intero did not support Nix. At that time, I tried Dante, but it didn’t feel as good as Intero was for Stack projects.
Later, I installed HIE, and it did work incredibly well with common Stack projects and single files. And, supposedly, it should integrate well with Nix. So I’d try and use it to do some Reflex.
Having set up the environment correctly, I opened my Emacs at app/Main.hs, which I copied from the second article:
{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}
module Main where
import Reflex
import Reflex.Dom
main = mainWidget $ el "div" $ do
t <- textArea def
el "div" $
dynText $ _textArea_value tAnd, when I opended it… Could not find module `Reflex' would show up at the import lines… Somehow, LSP/HIE/Flycheck were not interacting very well with my environment.
After a lot of research, and trial and error, I discovered that I needed to add some extra configuration to my Emacs (see below) and also that a =stack.yaml= file was required by Flycheck to work properly!
After those tweaks, it finally worked!
Since the Emacs wrappers use `nix-shell` (see bellow), there is no need to run `hpack` to generate the `.cabal` file everytime you change `package.yaml`. The way that the `reflex-platform.project` function is set up, it already detects that there is a `package.yaml` in the root (and changes to it) and runs `hpack` automatically:
ͳ sed -i -e 's/0.0.0.0/1.0.0.0/' package.yaml
ͳ nix-shell
building '/nix/store/dk00gx5yc5x2s4rf0x6kan1j2h5qpyl0-cabal2nix-reflex-skeleton.drv'...
installing
*** found package.yaml. Using hpack...
[nix-shell:~/dev/haskell/reflex-skeleton]$Magic! ✨
;; setup-haskell-nix.el
(require 'nix-haskell-mode)
(require 'lsp)
(require 'lsp-haskell)
(require 'lsp-ui)
(require 'nix-sandbox)
(add-hook 'haskell-mode-hook 'flycheck-mode)
(add-hook 'haskell-mode-hook #'lsp)
(add-hook 'haskell-mode-hook
(lambda ()
(let ((default-nix-wrapper (lambda (args)
(append
(append (list "nix-shell" "-I" "." "--command")
(list (mapconcat 'identity args " ")))
(list (nix-current-sandbox))))))
(setq-local lsp-haskell-process-wrapper-function default-nix-wrapper)
)))
(add-hook 'haskell-mode-hook
(lambda ()
(setq-local haskell-process-wrapper-function
(lambda (args) (apply 'nix-shell-command (nix-current-sandbox) args)))))
(add-hook 'flycheck-mode-hook
(lambda ()
(setq-local flycheck-command-wrapper-function
(lambda (command) (apply 'nix-shell-command (nix-current-sandbox) command)))
(setq-local flycheck-executable-find
(lambda (cmd) (nix-executable-find (nix-current-sandbox) cmd)))))lsp-modelsp-uilsp-haskellnix-sandboxnix-haskell-mode
Here are some of the problems I faced when trying to come up with the present setup. May it serve someone (myself included) for future reference.
During the trial and error saga, I tried adding various configurations to my Emacs Haskell config. After sorting everything out, I noticed that the minimal config I had to add in order for Emacs to use correctly my Nix environment was:
;; inspired by https://blog.latukha.com/NixOS-HIE-Emacs/
(add-hook 'haskell-mode-hook
(lambda ()
(let ((default-nix-wrapper (lambda (args)
(append
(append (list "nix-shell" "-I" "." "--command")
(list (mapconcat 'identity args " ")))
(list (nix-current-sandbox))))))
(setq-local lsp-haskell-process-wrapper-function default-nix-wrapper)
)))It makes Reflex and Reflex.Dom available for Flycheck. Yet, I’d get some error message about haskell-stack-ghc:
Suspicious state from syntax checker haskell-stack-ghc: Flycheck checker haskell-stack-ghc returned non-zero exit code 1, but its output contained no errors: Could not parse ‘/home/thales/dev/haskell/reflex-skeleton/stack.yaml’: Aeson exception: Error in $: failed to parse field “snapshot”: keys [“snapshot”,”resolver”] not present See http://docs.haskellstack.org/en/stable/yaml_configuration/
Try installing a more recent version of haskell-stack-ghc, and please open a bug report if the issue persists in the latest release. Thanks!
If I’m using Nix to manage the whole environment, should I need to declare a resolver? 🤔
I tried adding:
;; inspired from https://github.com/travisbhartwell/nix-emacs#flycheck
(add-hook 'haskell-mode-hook
(lambda ()
(setq-local haskell-process-wrapper-function
(lambda (args) (apply 'nix-shell-command (nix-current-sandbox) args)))))
(add-hook 'flycheck-mode-hook
(lambda ()
(setq-local flycheck-command-wrapper-function
(lambda (command) (apply 'nix-shell-command (nix-current-sandbox) command)))
(setq-local flycheck-executable-find
(lambda (cmd) (nix-executable-find (nix-current-sandbox) cmd)))))But the error still persists. It does not prevent me from developing, though.
At some point, whenever I tried to open app/Main.hs, LSP would report that HIE started successfully, but afterwards crash with something like:
readCreateProcess: /nix/store/jq8x50rkl3cm7cqkj1zsk6kfbb692iwv-cabal-helper-0.9.0.0/bin/cabal-helper-wrapper “–with-ghc=ghc” “–with-ghc-pkg=ghc-pkg” “–with-cabal=cabal” “v1-style” “/home/thales/dev/haskell/reflex-skeleton” “/home/thales/dev/haskell/reflex-skeleton/dist-newstyle/build/x86_64-linux/ghc-8.6.5/reflex-skeleton-0.0.0.0” “package-db-stack” “flags” “compiler-version” “ghc-merged-pkg-options” “config-flags” “non-default-config-flags” “ghc-src-options” “ghc-pkg-options” “ghc-lang-options” “ghc-options” “source-dirs” “entrypoints” “needs-build-output” (exit 1): failed
When executing this manually, I got some error saying that a file .../reflex-skeleton-0.0.0.0/setup-config (or something like that).
I found this issue that linked to this other issue that gave me a hint.
for x in $(find dist-newstyle -name setup-config | grep '/opt/setup-config$' | sed 's|/opt/setup-config$||g'); do
( cd $x
ln -fs opt/setup-config setup-config
)
doneI ran:
$ find dist-newstyle -name setup-config
dist-newstyle/build/x86_64-linux/ghc-8.6.5/reflex-skeleton-0.0.0.0/x/reflex-skeleton/setup-configWhat was this x in reflex-skeleton-0.0.0.0/x/reflex-skeleton/? I was fooling around with nix repl trying to understand things better, and at one point I assigned something to a variable x, and I guess it had the side effect of building something wrong. Simply removing the directories dist-newstyle and dist and trying to start Emacs again resolved this problem for me.
After fixing the cabal-helper-wrapper problems, I still got stumped with the following error that occurred at the import Reflex and import Reflex.Dom lines:
Could not find module `Reflex’ Use -v to see a list of the files searched for.
Could not find module `Reflex.Dom’ Use -v to see a list of the files searched for.
Then I tried M-x flycheck-verify-setup in Emacs:
Syntax checkers for buffer Main.hs in haskell-mode:
First checker to run:
haskell-stack-ghc
- may enable: yes
- executable: Found at home/thales.local/bin/stack
- next checkers: haskell-hlint
Checkers that may run as part of the first checker’s chain:
haskell-hlint
- may enable: yes
- executable: Found at /nix/store/c6mrw1iw24gdwvir1mi6ba4wid5ai8j3-ghc-8.6.5-with-packages/bin/hlint
- configuration file: Not found
Checkers that could run if selected:
haskell-ghc select
- may enable: yes
- executable: Found at /nix/store/c6mrw1iw24gdwvir1mi6ba4wid5ai8j3-ghc-8.6.5-with-packages/bin/ghc
- next checkers: haskell-hlint
The following syntax checkers are not registered:
- ats2
- lsp-ui
Try adding these syntax checkers to `flycheck-checkers’. Flycheck Mode is enabled. Use C-u C-c ! x to enable disabled checkers.
Flycheck version: 32snapshot (package: 20191108.2129) Emacs version: 26.3 System: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu Window system: x
Notice the first checker:
haskell-stack-ghc
- may enable: yes
- executable: Found at home/thales.local/bin/stack
- next checkers: haskell-hlint
It seemed to me that Flycheck was depending on Stack for package resolution somehow. At that time, I did not have a stack.yaml file in my project.
So, I added one with the contents:
nix:
enable: true
shell-file: shell.nixRestarted Emacs, opened app/Main.hs and boom! Reflex and Reflex.Dom where found! 🍺