[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: yackage 0.0.0

[Michael Snoyman]

Hi all,

I was speaking with my coworker Yitz[1] about a project he's working
on. Basically, he's going to end up with about 16 cabal packages that
are not going to be deployed to Hackage, and wanted us to set up a
Hackage server for our company to deploy these kinds of things.
However, getting all the pieces of Hackage aligned properly for such a
simple use case seemed a bit overkill.

I then realized that I had the exact same problem during Yesod
development: before I make a major release, I usually end up with
about 10-15 packages that are not yet live on Hackage. It gets to be a
real pain when suddenly wai-extra is depending on network 2.3 and
authenticate requires network 2.2, and suddenly I need to manually
recompile 10 packages.

So I decided to write up a simple web service to act as a local
Hackage server. It has no security (anyone with access can upload a
package), doesn't build haddocks, doesn't show package descriptions,
etc. All it does is:

Show a list of uploaded packages/versions
Links to the tarballs
Allows you to upload new versions, which will automatically overwrite
existing packages
Provides the 00-index.tar.gz file needed by cabal-install, as well as
the tarballs for all the packages

In order to use this, just do the following:

cabal install yackage
run "yackage"
Upload your packages
Add remote-repo: yackage:http://localhost:3500/ to your ~/.cabal/config file
cabal update
Install your packages are usual

You'll need to leave yackage running whenever you want to run an
update or download new packages. A few other usage notes:

If you overwrite a package, your cache folder will still have the old
version. You might want to just wipe our your cache folder on each
usage.
Running cabal update will download the update for both yackage and the
main hackage server; the latter can be a long process depending on
your internet connection.

Here's a little shell script that will disable the Hackage repo, wipe
our the Yackage cache, update and re-enable the Hackage repo:

#!/bin/sh

CABAL_DIR=~/.cabal

cp $CABAL_DIR/config $CABAL_DIR/config.sav
sed 's/^remote-repo: hackage/--remote-repo: hackage/' <
$CABAL_DIR/config.sav > $CABAL_DIR/config
rm -rf $CABAL_DIR/packages/yackage
cabal update
cp $CABAL_DIR/config.sav $CABAL_DIR/config

I hope others find this tool useful.

Michael

[1] http://www.haskellers.com/user/Yitz_Gale/