GHCi¶

stack ghci allows you to load components and files of your project into ghci. It uses the same TARGET syntax as stack build, and can also take options like --test, --bench, and --flag. Similarly to stack build, the default is to load up ghci with all libraries and executables in the project.

In order to load multiple components, stack ghci combines all of the ghc options together. This doesn't work in the general case, but when the packages being loaded share similar conventions, it should work out. A common source of issues is when one component defines default extensions which aren't assumed by another component. For example, specifying NoImplicitPrelude in one component but not another is quite likely to cause failures. ghci will be run with -XNoImplicitPrelude, but it is likely that modules in the other component assume that the Prelude is implicitly imported.

Selecting Main module¶

When loading multiple packages, there may be multiple definitions for the Main module. You can specify which Main module to load by passing in the --main-is TARGET flag. If no selection is made and there are multiple Main modules, you will be asked to select from a list of options.

Speeding up initial load¶

There are two ways to speed up the initial startup of ghci:

• --no-build, to skip an initial build step. This only works if the dependencies have already been built.

• --no-load, to skip loading all defined modules into ghci. You can then directly use :load MyModule to load a specific module in your project.

Loading a filepath directly¶

Instead of the TARGET syntax, it is also possible to directly run stack ghci src/MyFile.hs. This will figure out which component the file is associated with, and use the options from that component.

Specifying extra packages to build / depend on¶

Sometimes you want to load ghci with an additional package, that isn't a direct dependency of your components. This can be achieved by using the --package flag. For example, if I want to experiment with the lens library, I can run stack ghci --package lens.

Running plain ghci¶

stack ghci always runs ghci configured to load code from packages in your project. In particular, this means it passes in flags like -hide-all-packages and -package-id= in order to configure which packages are visible to ghci.

For doing experiments which just involve packages installed in your databases, it may be useful to run ghci plainly like stack exec ghci. This will run a plain ghci in an environment which includes GHC_PACKAGE_PATH, and so will have access to your databases.