Custom Setup to automate package modules discovery.
autopack
is in early beta phase.
Usually, when working on a Haskell project, you end up having lots of modules.
During the development, you can add, remove or rename any of them. And this is
fine unless you continuously need remembering to add, remove or rename the
corresponding module line in the .cabal
file. Sometimes all you want is to
make Cabal
dealing with it, so you won't need to patch any files when
performing any operations on modules. Good news, everyone! This project was
created precisely to help to solve this particular issue.
autopack
is a Haskell library that provides custom setup functions that
discover all exposed .hs
files for your library from the hs-source-dirs
folders. It uses this information to prehook the list of identified modules into
the exposed-modules
field of the library stanza of your package description.
You can use Cabal's custom setup scripts to use this library in your project. In the next section, we are going to give detailed instructions on that.
For now, all you need to keep in mind to use autopack
:
- It uses
hs-source-dirs
field to establish where to look up for modules. - It can work only with
.hs
and.hsc
extensions at the moment. - It adds all discovered modules into
exposed-modules
of the library stanza. - If there are already some modules in the
exposed-modules
,autopack
will concatenate lists.
First, make sure that you are using the Cabal version at least 2.0
in your
.cabal
file. For example:
cabal-version: 2.4
Now you need to change the
build-type
field in your package_name.cabal
file to Custom
instead of the default
Simple
:
build-type: Custom
Then you have to add custom-setup
section before you defining your library
stanza. It should have the autopack
dependency so you can use it in your
Setup
:
custom-setup
setup-depends: base
, autopack
And the final preparation. You should add the Setup.hs
module (or replace the
default one) in the root directory of the package with the following content:
import Autopack (defaultMainAutoModules)
main :: IO ()
main = defaultMainAutoModules
You are all set up now!
You can remove exposed-module
field from your .cabal
file completely, and autopack
will discover all the .hs
modules in your
folders for you during the build.
As Cabal
does not currently provide the feature of automatic modules
discovery, there are some workarounds for this process. One of them is this
library — autopack
that uses Cabal
's Setup feature to discover all modules
during the pre-build stage of Cabal
. Another tool that provides it
out-of-the-box is hpack
. It is the wrapper on
Cabal
syntax via YAML
where there is no need to write modules explicitly.
They are added to the exposed-modules
field of the .cabal
file during the
YAML to .cabal
step of the tool work process. You may also be interested in
cabal-fmt
– a non-official
.cabal
files formatter than can optionally expand source directories during
formatting.
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