Lesson 35. Building projects with stack
After reading lesson 35, you’ll be able to
- Work with Haskell’s stack build tool
- Build stack projects
- Configure key files generated by stack
When moving beyond learning a programming language to using it for more serious projects, one of the most important things to have is proper build automation. One universal option is to use a tool such as GNU Make. But many languages have their own build tools. Java has several industrial-strength options such as Ant and Maven, Scala has sbt, and Ruby has rake. Given Haskell’s academic history, it might come as a surprise that Haskell too has a powerful build tool: stack. The stack build tool is a relatively recent addition to the Haskell ecosystem, but it has had a tremendous impact. stack automates and manages several parts of Haskell projects:
- Provides an isolated installation of GHC per project to ensure that you’re always using the correct version
- Handles the installation of packages and their dependencies
- Automates the building of the project
- Aids you in organizing and running tests on your project