6. Nix Integration

Nix is a package manager popular with some Haskell developers due to its focus on reliability and reproducibility. cabal now has the ability to integrate with Nix for dependency management during local package development.

6.1. Enabling Nix Integration

To enable Nix integration, simply pass the --enable-nix global option when you call cabal. To use this option everywhere, edit your $HOME/.cabal/config file to include:

nix: True

If the package (which must be locally unpacked) provides a shell.nix or default.nix file, this flag will cause cabal to run most commands through nix-shell. If both expressions are present, shell.nix is preferred. The following commands are affected:

  • cabal configure
  • cabal build
  • cabal repl
  • cabal install (only if installing into a sandbox)
  • cabal haddock
  • cabal freeze
  • cabal gen-bounds
  • cabal run

If the package does not provide an expression, cabal runs normally.

6.2. Creating Nix Expressions

The Nix package manager is based on a lazy, pure, functional programming language; packages are defined by expressions in this language. The fastest way to create a Nix expression for a Cabal package is with the cabal2nix tool. To create a shell.nix expression for the package in the current directory, run this command:

$ cabal2nix --shell ./. >shell.nix

6.3. Nix Expression Evaluation

(This section describes for advanced users how Nix expressions are evaluated.)

First, the Nix expression (shell.nix or default.nix) is instantiated with nix-instantiate. The --add-root and --indirect options are used to create an indirect root in the Cabal build directory, preventing Nix from garbage collecting the derivation while in use. The IN_NIX_SHELL environment variable is set so that builtins.getEnv works as it would in nix-shell.

Next, the commands above are run through nix-shell using the instantiated derivation. Again, --add-root and --indirect are used to prevent Nix from garbage collecting the packages in the environment. The child cabal process reads the CABAL_IN_NIX_SHELL environment variable to prevent it from spawning additional child shells.

6.4. Further Reading

The Nix manual provides further instructions for writing Nix expressions. The Nixpkgs manual describes the infrastructure provided for Haskell packages.