
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/