On Windows, Stack comes with an installation of MSYS2.
MSYS2 will be used by Stack to provide a Unix-like shell and environment for
Stack. This may be necessary for installing some Haskell packages, such as those
which use configure scripts. No matter which terminal software you choose
(Windows Terminal, Console Windows Host, Command Prompt, PowerShell, Git bash or
any other) you can use this environment too by executing all programs through
stack exec -- <program_name>. This is especially useful if your
project needs some additional tools during the build phase.
Executables and libraries can be installed with the MSYS2 package manager
pacman. All tools can be found in the
package list. A list of
commands that work with
pacman is also available. Just remember that pacman — like all other
tools — should be started with stack exec -- pacman.
The Stack-supplied MSYS2 can itself be updated with the Stack-supplied pacman.
See the MSYS2 guide
'III. Updating packages'. If
the Stack-supplied pacman has a version that is 5.0.1.6403 or greater (see
stack exec -- pacman --version) then the command to update is simply:
stack exec -- pacman -Syuu
This command may need to be run more than once, until everything is reported by
pacman as 'up to date' and 'nothing to do'.
Setup.hs is automatically run inside the Stack environment. So when you need
to launch another tool you don't need to prefix the command with stack exec --
within the custom Setup.hs file.
The following lists MSYS2 packages known to allow the installation of some common Haskell packages on Windows. Feel free to submit additional entries via a pull request.
- For text-icu install
mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-icu
CMake has trouble finding other tools even if they are available on the PATH.
Likely this is not a CMake problem but one of the environment not fully
integrating. For example GHC comes with a copy of GCC which is not installed by
MSYS2 itself. If you want to use this GCC you can provide a full path to it, or
find it first with System.Directory.findExecutable if you want to launch GCC
from a Haskell file such as Setup.hs.
Experience tells that the mingw-w64 versions of Make and CMake are most
likely to work. Though there are other versions available through pacman, so
have a look to see what works for you. Both tools can be installed with the
commands:
stack exec -- pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-make
stack exec -- pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-cmake
Even though Make and CMake are then both installed into the same environment, CMake still seems to have trouble to find Make. To help CMake find GCC and Make supply the following flags:
-DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=path
-DCMAKE_MAKE_PROGRAM=path