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The stack setup command

stack setup [GHC_VERSION] [--[no-]reinstall] [--ghc-bindist URL]
            [--ghcjs-boot-options GHCJS_BOOT] [--[no-]ghcjs-boot-clean]

stack setup attempts to install a version of GHC.

By default:

  • the version of GHC is the one required by the project. Specify the version of GHC as an argument to attempt to install a different version of GHC. For example stack setup 9.4.4 will attempt to install GHC 9.4.4; and

  • an attempt to install is made only if the version of GHC is not already available to Stack. Pass the flag --reinstall (disabled by default) to attempt to install the version of GHC regardless of whether it is already available to Stack.

Pass the option --ghc-bindist <url> to specify the URL of the GHC to be downloaded and installed. This option requires the use of the --ghc-variant option specifying a custom GHC variant. For further information about the --ghc-variant option, see the see the YAML configuration documentation.

If Stack is configured not to install GHC (install-ghc: false or passing the --no-install-ghc flag) then stack setup will warn that the flag and the command are inconsistent and take no action.

A particular binary distribution of GHC will depend on certain libraries, which need to be available.

There are many different Linux distributions and different versions of a particular Linux distribution. One Linux distribution/version may make available different libraries to another Linux distribution/version.

In attempting to identify the particular binary distribution of GHC that is required on Linux, Stack will refer to the presence or absence of certain libraries or the versions of those libraries.

For example, Stack 2.9.3 considers:

  • if libgmp.so.3 or libgmp.so.10 is present. These files are provided by different versions of the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library.

  • if libncursesw.so.6 is present. This file is provided by a shared library for terminal handling with wide character support.

  • if libtinfo.so.5 or libtinfo.so.6 is present. These files are provided by different versions of a shared low-level terminfo library for terminal handling.

Stack 2.9.3 uses ghc-build:

  • tinfo6 to indicate libgmp.so.10 and libtinfo.so.6 are present
  • ncurses6 to indicate libgmp.so.10 and libncursesw.so.6 are present
  • gmp4 to indicate libgmp.so.3 is present

GHC also depends on libc6, the GNU C Library (glibc). The GNU C Library is designed to be backwards compatible.

By default, versions of Stack up to 2.9.3 associate the tinfo6 build with the 'Fedora 33' binary distribution of GHC 9.4.1 to 9.4.4. Those binary distributions require versions of libc6 that are compatible with libc6 2.32.

For Linux distributions/versions that provide versions of libc6 that are not compatible with libc6 2.32 but are compatible with libc6 2.28, the 'Debian 10' binary distributions of GHC 9.4.1 to 9.4.4 may be a viable alternative. They can be specified using a setup-info key in a Stack YAML configuration file (global or project-level), as follows:

setup-info:
  ghc:
    linux64-tinfo6:
      9.4.1:
        url: "https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/9.4.1/ghc-9.4.1-x86_64-deb10-linux.tar.xz"
        content-length: 186574068
        sha1: 7e885cae97fbf893d8d3e41e19131a6c73264941
        sha256: dcbff828b14a59d01d3fda68bb01b9cbc3a321a0c013905f436df5627128aa58
      9.4.2:
        url: "https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/9.4.2/ghc-9.4.2-x86_64-deb10-linux.tar.xz"
        content-length: 184995132
        sha1: 004f5aec6ab60ca95ddd78fa2b99d6d7657e6a06
        sha256: 5bf34ef70a2b824d45e525f09690c76707b7f01698962e425e8fd78b94ea9174
      9.4.3:
        url: "https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/9.4.3/ghc-9.4.3-x86_64-deb10-linux.tar.xz"
        content-length: 184837364
        sha1: 28a94f2da6077d725a7d72f48bc909cf9f2444e3
        sha256: 940ac2b1770dc63b5f3f38f829bfe69f4a572d6b26cd93094cdd99d5300b5067
      9.4.4:
        url: "https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/9.4.4/ghc-9.4.4-x86_64-deb10-linux.tar.xz"
        content-length: 187207372
        sha1: e8b22f0c2b523e368a7df557e8ee915c42790cb9
        sha256: a3ecd2426bb519d6fdad05904c386f1c74b433f07722b0d1ef606c23159ade2d

Examples of such Linux distributions/versions are Debian 10 itself, Debian 11 (libc6 2.31), and Ubuntu 20.04 (libc6 2.31).