rootless_haskell

install Haskell on EWS without root permissions

This is a temporary stopgap measure for installing Haskell (with Stack) on Illinois EWS user accounts.

About

Benefits:

• You get to do your homework on EWS.

Caveats:

• Slow. This will take 30-60 minutes to install on EWS.
• Big. It uses over 2 GB of your storage quota.
• Probably deprecated soon. Hopefully there will be an official Haskell module available on the server.

This script downloads and builds the GMP library from source, but jury-rigs the resulting files with a few that do exist on the server for compatibility, using symlinks.

Then it downloads and installs Stack binaries, and Stack installs GHC binaries. Several tweaks have been made to make sure these installers use the correct library files.

Checklist

(If you aren't using an EWS account at UIUC this script is probably useless to you.)

Before installation:

• Read the script to see what it does.
• Back up any crucial files in your EWS home directory to an external location.

Installation:

• Put the script in your home directory (cd ~) and then run it (sh ./install_rootless_haskell.sh)

After installation:

• Every terminal session, it's necessary to type source ~/rootless_haskell.rc to get started.
• The first time a stack test is run in a project directory, a bunch of packages will download and build... it won't take so long after that.

Troubleshooting

Unfortunately I can't guarantee this technique will work. It seems to work sometimes, but the installer may still be terminated by the server if the terminal session disconnects.

If you are trying to do this over SSH, and you probably shouldn't, then you may get disconnected during the install which will ruin everything. One thing you could do is press ctrl-Z after the install begins, which pauses the process, and then type bg && disown. That will let the installer keep running (invisibly) apart from your terminal session. If it goes crazy for some reason, you'd have to hunt down and kill it with ps aux | grep `whoami` | grep install and then kill the PID.

Uninstallation

You can remove this version of Haskell from your home directory like this:

cd ~
rm -rf .stack stack .gmp

Be careful!

---

Script by Eric Huber based on a script by Yury Antonov.