How to set up Haskell on Mac OS X

This guide assumes, that you have the brilliant Homebrew installed. If not, I recommend that you go to the Homebrew homepage and install it first.

Resetting Cabal and GHC package database

Sometimes you fiddle around your installation, and end up with messed up system that won't compile anything non-trivial. Cabal might have gotten into twist. In this case, the easiest solution sometimes is to do a reset and reinstall. It won't take much time, but allows you to have clean slate.

Magic incatations needed for cleanup are following:

    brew uninstall haskell-platform ghc  
    rm -rf ~/.ghc ~/.cabal

These commands uninstall ghc (the haskell compiler) and haskell-platform (the standard library) and remove local databases.

Set up Haskell

Using brew, install haskell-platform with ghc (if brew formula for ghc is missing, it's likely that ghc has been rolled into haskell-platform).

    brew install ghc haskell-platform

After the haskell-platform has been installed, update cabal database with command

    cabal update

Add cabal binaries to PATH

This step depends a lot on your default shell. For bash, open ~/.bashrc to an editor of your choice, and add following line to the end:

    export PATH=$PATH:~/.cabal/bin

Next, take the new PATH to use with command

    source ~/.bashrc

Final words

Now you should have a working Haskell installation. Please note that sometimes your cabal installation may go corrupt (unsatiable or conflicting dependences) - in this case, you may need to use the reset described in the (first section.