yaml_configuration.md

YAML Configuration

This page is intended to fully document all configuration options available in the stack.yaml file. Note that this page is likely to be both incomplete and sometimes inaccurate. If you see such cases, please update the page, and if you're not sure how, open an issue labeled "question".

The stack.yaml configuration options break down into project-specific options in:

• <project dir>/stack.yaml

and non-project-specific options in:

• /etc/stack/config.yaml -- for system global non-project default options
• ~/.stack/config.yaml -- for user non-project default options
• The project file itself may also contain non-project specific options

Note: When stack is invoked outside a stack project it will source project specific options from ~/.stack/global-project/stack.yaml. When stack is invoked inside a stack project, only options from <project dir>/stack.yaml are used, and ~/.stack/global-project/stack.yaml is ignored.

Project-specific config

Project-specific options are only valid in the stack.yaml file local to a project, not in the user or global config files.

Note: We define project to mean a directory that contains a stack.yaml file, which specifies how to build a set of packages. We define package to be a package with a .cabal file or Hpack package.yaml file.

In your project-specific options, you specify both which local packages to build and which dependencies to use when building these packages. Unlike the user's local packages, these dependencies aren't built by default. They only get built when needed.

Shadowing semantics, described here, are applied to your configuration. So, if you add a package to your packages list, it will be used even if you're using a snapshot that specifies a particular version. Similarly, extra-deps will shadow the version specified in the resolver.

resolver

Specifies which snapshot is to be used for this project. A snapshot defines a GHC version, a number of packages available for installation, and various settings like build flags. It is called a resolver since a snapshot states how dependencies are resolved. There are currently four resolver types:

• LTS Haskell snapshots, e.g. resolver: lts-2.14
• Stackage Nightly snapshot, e.g. resolver: nightly-2015-06-16
• No snapshot, just use packages shipped with the compiler
  • For GHC this looks like resolver: ghc-7.10.2
  • For GHCJS this looks like resolver: ghcjs-0.1.0_ghc-7.10.2.
• Custom snapshot

Each of these resolvers will also determine what constraints are placed on the compiler version. See the compiler-check option for some additional control over compiler version.

packages and extra-deps

NOTE The contents of this section have changed significantly since extensible snapshots were implemented (see: writeup and PR #3249). Most old syntax is still supported with newer versions of Stack, but will not be documented here. Instead, this section contains the recommended syntax as of Stack v1.6.0.

There are two types of packages that can be defined in your stack.yaml file:

• Project packages, those which you are actually working on in your current project. These are local file paths in your project directory.
• Extra dependencies, which are packages provided locally on top of the snapshot definition of available packages. These can come from Hackage (or an alternative package index you've defined, see package-indices), an HTTP(S) or local archive, a Git or Mercurial repository, or a local file path.

These two sets of packages are both installed into your local package database within your project. However, beyond that, they are completely different:

• Project packages will be built by default with a stack build without specific targets. Extra dependencies will only be built if they are depended upon.
• Test suites and benchmarks may be run for project packages. They are never run for extra dependencies.

The packages key is a simple list of file paths, which will be treated as relative to the directory containing your stack.yaml file. For example:

packages:
- .
- dir1/dir2

Each package directory or location specified must have a valid cabal file or hpack package.yaml file present. Note that the subdirectories of the directory are not searched for cabal files. Subdirectories will have to be specified as independent items in the list of packages.

When the packages field is not present, it defaults to looking for a package in the project's root directory:

packages:
- .

The extra-deps key is given a list of all extra dependencies. If omitted, it is taken as the empty list, e.g.:

extra-deps: []

It supports four different styles of values:

Package index

Packages can be stated by a name/version combination, which will be looked up in the package index (by default, Hackage). The basic syntax for this is:

extra-deps:
- acme-missiles-0.3

Using this syntax, the most recent Cabal file revision available will be used. For more reproducibility of builds, it is recommended to state the SHA256 hash of the cabal file contents as well, like this:

extra-deps:
- acme-missiles-0.3@sha256:2ba66a092a32593880a87fb00f3213762d7bca65a687d45965778deb8694c5d1

Or a specific revision number, with 0 being the original file:

extra-deps:
- acme-missiles-0.3@rev:0

Note that specifying via SHA256 is slightly more resilient in that it does not rely on correct ordering in the package index, while revision number is likely simpler to use. In practice, both should guarantee equally reproducible build plans.

If unspecified, subdirs defaults to ['.'] (i.e. look only in the top-level directory). Note that if you specify a value of subdirs, then '.' is not included by default and needs to be explicitly specified if a required package is found in the top-level directory of the repository.

Local file path

Like packages, local file paths can be used in extra-deps, and will be relative to the directory containing the stack.yaml file.

extra-deps:
- vendor/somelib

Note that if a local directory can be parsed as a package identifier, Stack will treat it as a package identifier. In other words, if you have a local directory named foo-1.2.3, instead of:

extra-deps:
- foo-1.2.3

You should use the following to be explicit:

extra-deps:
- ./foo-1.2.3

Git and Mercurial repos

You can give a Git or Mercurial repo at a specific commit, and Stack will clone that repo.

extra-deps:
- git: [email protected]:commercialhaskell/stack.git
  commit: 6a86ee32e5b869a877151f74064572225e1a0398
- hg: https://example.com/hg/repo
  commit: da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709

NOTE It is highly recommended that you only use SHA1 values for a Git or Mercurial commit. Other values may work, but they are not officially supported, and may result in unexpected behavior (namely, Stack will not automatically pull to update to new versions). Another problem with this is that your build will not be deterministic, because when someone else tries to build the project they can get a different checkout of the package.

A common practice in the Haskell world is to use "megarepos", or repositories with multiple packages in various subdirectories. Some common examples include wai and digestive-functors. To support this, you may also specify subdirs for repositories, e.g.:

extra-deps:
- git: [email protected]:yesodweb/wai
  commit: 2f8a8e1b771829f4a8a77c0111352ce45a14c30f
  subdirs:
  - auto-update
  - wai

If unspecified, subdirs defaults to subdirs: [.], or looking for a package in the root of the repo.

Archives (HTTP(S) or local filepath)

This one's pretty straightforward: you can use HTTP and HTTPS URLs and local filepaths referring to either tarballs or ZIP files.

NOTE Stack assumes that these files never change after downloading to avoid needing to make an HTTP request on each build.

extra-deps:
- https://example.com/foo/bar/baz-0.0.2.tar.gz
- archive: http://github.com/yesodweb/wai/archive/2f8a8e1b771829f4a8a77c0111352ce45a14c30f.zip
  subdirs:
  - wai
  - warp
- archive: ../acme-missiles-0.3.tar.gz
  sha256: e563d8b524017a06b32768c4db8eff1f822f3fb22a90320b7e414402647b735b

Note that HTTP(S) URLs also support subdirs like repos to allow for archives of megarepos. In order to leverage this, use location: http://....

flags

Flags can be set for each package separately, e.g.

flags:
  package-name:
    flag-name: true

If a specified flag is different than the one specified for a snapshot package, then the snapshot package will automatically be promoted to be an extra-dep.

image

The image settings are used for the creation of container images using stack image container, e.g.

image:
  containers:
    - base: "fpco/stack-build"
      add:
        static: /data/static

base is the docker image that will be used to built upon. The add lines allow you to add additional directories to your image. You can specify the name of the image using name (otherwise it defaults to the same as your project). You can also specify entrypoints. By default all your executables are placed in /usr/local/bin, but you can specify a list using executables to only add some.

When you specify entrypoints, multiple containers will be built: a project container, and one container for each entrypoint.

For example the following configuration:

image:
  containers:
  - name: myproject
    base: fpco/stack-run
    add:
      production/app-backend/conf/: /etc/app-backend
    entrypoints:
    - app-backend

will build one container tagged myproject:latest which contains the project including the /etc/app-backend configuration data.

Another container tagged myproject-app-backend:latest based on the myproject:latest will additionally contain the logic for starting the app-backend entrypoint.

user-message

A user-message is inserted by stack init when it omits packages or adds external dependencies. For example:

user-message: ! 'Warning: Some packages were found to be incompatible with the resolver
  and have been left commented out in the packages section.

  Warning: Specified resolver could not satisfy all dependencies. Some external packages
  have been added as dependencies.

  You can omit this message by removing it from stack.yaml

'

This messages is displayed every time the config is loaded by stack and serves as a reminder for the user to review the configuration and make any changes if needed. The user can delete this message if the generated configuration is acceptable.

Non-project-specific config

Non-project config options may go in the global config (/etc/stack/config.yaml) or the user config (~/.stack/config.yaml).

docker

See Docker integration.

nix

(since 0.1.10.0)

See Nix integration.

connection-count

Integer indicating how many simultaneous downloads are allowed to happen

Default: 8

hide-th-loading

Strip out the "Loading ..." lines from GHC build output, produced when using Template Haskell

Default: true

latest-snapshot-url

URL providing a JSON with information on the latest LTS and Nightly snapshots, used for automatic project configuration.

Default: https://www.stackage.org/download/snapshots.json

local-bin-path

Target directory for stack install and stack build --copy-bins.

Default: ~/.local/bin

package-indices

package-indices:
- name: Hackage
  download-prefix: https://s3.amazonaws.com/hackage.fpcomplete.com/package/

  # HTTP location of the package index
  http: https://s3.amazonaws.com/hackage.fpcomplete.com/01-index.tar.gz

  # Or, if using Hackage Security below, give the root URL:
  http: https://s3.amazonaws.com/hackage.fpcomplete.com/

  # optional fields, both default to false
  require-hashes: false

  # Starting with stack 1.4, we default to using Hackage Security
  hackage-security:
    keyids: ["deadbeef", "12345"] # list of all approved keys
    key-threshold: 3 # number of keys required

One thing you should be aware of: if you change the contents of package-version combination by setting a different package index, this can have an effect on other projects by installing into your shared snapshot database.

Note that older versions of Stack supported Git-based indices. This feature has since been removed. A line such as:

git: https://github.com/commercialhaskell/all-cabal-hashes.git
gpg-verify: false

Will now be ignored.

IMPORTANT Hackage and its mirrors typically have two index files available: 00-index.tar.gz and 01-index.tar.gz. The former is a legacy file for backwards compatibility. It does not contain the cabal file revisions produced by Hackage, and therefore will not work with most snapshots. Instead, you need to use 01-index.tar.gz to ensure that exact revisions can be found, ensuring more reproducible builds.

system-ghc

Enables or disables using the GHC available on the PATH. Useful to enable if you want to save the time, bandwidth or storage space needed to setup an isolated GHC. Default is false unless the Docker or Nix integration is enabled. In a Nix-enabled configuration, stack is incompatible with system-ghc: false.

# Turn on system GHC
system-ghc: true

install-ghc

Whether or not to automatically install GHC when necessary. Since Stack 1.5.0, the default is true, which means Stack will not ask you before downloading and installing GHC.

skip-ghc-check

Should we skip the check to confirm that your system GHC version (on the PATH) matches what your project expects? Default is false.

require-stack-version

Require a version of stack within the specified range (cabal-style) to be used for this project. Example: require-stack-version: "== 0.1.*"

Default: "-any"

arch/os

Set the architecture and operating system for GHC, build directories, etc. Values are those recognized by Cabal, e.g.:

arch: i386, x86_64
os: windows, linux

You likely only ever want to change the arch value. This can also be set via the command line.

extra-include-dirs/extra-lib-dirs

A list of extra paths to be searched for header files and libraries, respectively. Paths should be absolute

extra-include-dirs:
- /opt/foo/include
extra-lib-dirs:
- /opt/foo/lib

Since these are system-dependent absolute paths, it is recommended that you specify these in your config.yaml within the stack root (usually, ~/.stack). If you control the build environment in your project's stack.yaml, perhaps through docker or other means, then it may well make sense to include these there as well.

with-gcc

Specify a path to gcc explicitly, rather than relying on the normal path resolution.

with-gcc: /usr/local/bin/gcc-5

with-hpack

Use an Hpack executable, rather than using the bundled Hpack.

with-hpack: /usr/local/bin/hpack

compiler-check

(Since 0.1.4)

Specifies how the compiler version in the resolver is matched against concrete versions. Valid values:

• match-minor: make sure that the first three components match, but allow patch-level differences. For example< 7.8.4.1 and 7.8.4.2 would both match 7.8.4. This is useful to allow for custom patch levels of a compiler. This is the default
• match-exact: the entire version number must match precisely
• newer-minor: the third component can be increased, e.g. if your resolver is ghc-7.10.1, then 7.10.2 will also be allowed. This was the default up through stack 0.1.3

compiler

(Since 0.1.7)

Overrides the compiler version in the resolver. Note that the compiler-check flag also applies to the version numbers. This uses the same syntax as compiler resolvers like ghc-7.10.2 or ghcjs-0.1.0.20150924_ghc-7.10.2 (version used for the 'old-base' version of GHCJS). While it's useful to override the compiler for a variety of reasons, the main usecase is to use GHCJS with a stackage snapshot, like this:

resolver: lts-3.10
compiler: ghcjs-0.1.0.20150924_ghc-7.10.2
compiler-check: match-exact

ghc-options

(Since 0.1.4)

Allows specifying per-package and global GHC options:

ghc-options:
    # All packages
    "$locals": -Wall
    "$targets": -Werror
    "$everything": -O2
    some-package: -DSOME_CPP_FLAG

Since 1.6.0, setting a GHC options for a specific package will automatically promote it to a local package (much like setting a custom package flag). However, setting options via $everything on all flags will not do so (see Github discussion for reasoning). This can lead to unpredictable behavior by affecting your snapshot packages.

The behavior of the $locals, $targets, and $everything special keys mirrors the behavior for the apply-ghc-options setting, which affects command line parameters.

NOTE: Prior to version 1.6.0, the $locals, $targets, and $everything keys were not support. Instead, you could use "*" for the behavior represented now by $everything. It is highly recommended to switch to the new, more expressive, keys.

apply-ghc-options

(Since 0.1.6)

Which packages do ghc-options on the command line get applied to? Before 0.1.6, the default value was targets

apply-ghc-options: locals # all local packages, the default
# apply-ghc-options: targets # all local packages that are targets
# apply-ghc-options: everything # applied even to snapshot and extra-deps

Note that everything is a slightly dangerous value, as it can break invariants about your snapshot database.

rebuild-ghc-options

(Since 0.1.6)

Should we rebuild a package when its GHC options change? Before 0.1.6, this was a non-configurable true. However, in most cases, the flag is used to affect optimization levels and warning behavior, for which GHC itself doesn't actually recompile the modules anyway. Therefore, the new behavior is to not recompile on an options change, but this behavior can be changed back with the following:

rebuild-ghc-options: true

ghc-variant

(Since 0.1.5)

Specify a variant binary distribution of GHC to use. Known values:

• standard: This is the default, uses the standard GHC binary distribution
• integersimple: Use a GHC bindist that uses integer-simple instead of GMP
• any other value: Use a custom GHC bindist. You should specify setup-info so stack setup knows where to download it, or pass the stack setup --ghc-bindist argument on the command-line

This option is incompatible with system-ghc: true.

ghc-build

(Since 1.3.0)

Specify a specialized architecture bindist to use. Normally this is determined automatically, but you can override the autodetected value here. Possible arguments include standard, gmp4, tinfo6, and nopie.

setup-info

(Since 0.1.5)

Allows overriding from where tools like GHC and msys2 (on Windows) are downloaded. Most useful for specifying locations of custom GHC binary distributions (for use with the ghc-variant option):

setup-info:
  ghc:
    windows32-custom-foo:
      7.10.2:
        url: "https://example.com/ghc-7.10.2-i386-unknown-mingw32-foo.tar.xz"

Or without using ghc-variant:

setup-info: "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fpco/stackage-content/master/stack/stack-setup-2.yaml"

url may be either URL or (since 1.2.0) absolute file path.

pvp-bounds

(Since 0.1.5)

NOTE As of Stack 1.6.0, this feature does not reliably work, due to issues with the Cabal library's printer. Stack will generate a warning when a lossy conversion occurs, in which case you may need to disable this setting. See #3550 for more information.

When using the sdist and upload commands, this setting determines whether the cabal file's dependencies should be modified to reflect PVP lower and upper bounds. Values are none (unchanged), upper (add upper bounds), lower (add lower bounds), and both (and upper and lower bounds). The algorithm it follows is:

• If an upper or lower bound already exists on a dependency, it's left alone
• When adding a lower bound, we look at the current version specified by stack.yaml, and set it as the lower bound (e.g., foo >= 1.2.3)
• When adding an upper bound, we require less than the next major version (e.g., foo < 1.3)

pvp-bounds: none

For more information, see the announcement blog post.

NOTE Since Stack 1.5.0, each of the values listed above supports adding -revision to the end of each value, e.g. pvp-bounds: both-revision. This means that, when uploading to Hackage, Stack will first upload your tarball with an unmodified .cabal file, and then upload a cabal file revision with the PVP bounds added. This can be useful—especially combined with the Stackage no-revisions feature—as a method to ensure PVP compliance without having to proactively fix bounds issues for Stackage maintenance.

modify-code-page

(Since 0.1.6)

Modify the code page for UTF-8 output when running on Windows. Default behavior is to modify.

modify-code-page: false

explicit-setup-deps

(Since 0.1.6)

Decide whether a custom Setup.hs script should be run with an explicit list of dependencies, based on the dependencies of the package itself. It associates the name of a local package with a boolean. When it's true, the Setup.hs script is built with an explicit list of packages. When it's false (default), the Setup.hs script is built without access to the local DB, but can access any package in the snapshot / global DB.

Note that in the future, this will be unnecessary, once Cabal provides full support for explicit Setup.hs dependencies.

explicit-setup-deps:
    "*": true # change the default
    entropy: false # override the new default for one package

NOTE: since 1.4.0, Stack has support for Cabal's custom-setup block (introduced in Cabal 1.24). If a custom-setup block is provided in a .cabal file, it will override the setting of explicit-setup-deps, and instead rely on the stated dependencies.

allow-newer

(Since 0.1.7)

Ignore version bounds in .cabal files. Default is false.

allow-newer: true

Note that this also ignores lower bounds. The name "allow-newer" is chosen to match the commonly used cabal option.

allow-different-user

(Since 1.0.1)

Allow users other than the owner of the stack root directory (typically ~/.stack) to use the stack installation. The default is false. POSIX systems only.

allow-different-user: true

The intention of this option is to prevent file permission problems, for example as the result of a stack command executed under sudo.

The option is automatically enabled when stack is re-spawned in a Docker process.

build

(Since 1.1.0)

Allows setting build options which are usually specified on the CLI. Here are the settings with their defaults:

build:
  library-profiling: false
  executable-profiling: false
  copy-bins: false
  prefetch: false
  keep-going: false

  # NOTE: global usage of haddock can cause build failures when documentation is
  # incorrectly formatted.  This could also affect scripts which use stack.
  haddock: false
  haddock-arguments:
    haddock-args: []      # Additional arguments passed to haddock, --haddock-arguments
    # haddock-args:
    # - "--css=/home/user/my-css"
  open-haddocks: false    # --open
  haddock-deps: false     # if unspecified, defaults to true if haddock is set
  haddock-internal: false

  # These are inadvisable to use in your global configuration, as they make the
  # stack build CLI behave quite differently.
  test: false
  test-arguments:
    rerun-tests: true   # Rerun successful tests
    additional-args: [] # --test-arguments
    # additional-args:
    # - "--fail-fast"
    coverage: false
    no-run-tests: false
  bench: false
  benchmark-opts:
    benchmark-arguments: ""
    # benchmark-arguments: "--csv bench.csv"
    no-run-benchmarks: false
  force-dirty: false
  reconfigure: false
  cabal-verbose: false
  split-objs: false

The meanings of these settings correspond directly with the CLI flags of the same name. See the build command docs and the users guide for more info.

dump-logs

(Since 1.3.0)

Control which log output from local non-dependency packages to print to the console. By default, Stack will only do this when building a single target package or if the log contains warnings, to avoid generating unnecessarily verbose output.

dump-logs: none      # don't dump logs even if they contain warnings
dump-logs: warning   # default: dump logs that contain warnings
dump-logs: all       # dump all logs for local non-dependency packages

templates

Templates used with stack new have a number of parameters that affect the generated code. These can be set for all new projects you create. The result of them can be observed in the generated LICENSE and cabal files. The value for all of these parameters must be strings.

The parameters are: author-email, author-name, category, copyright, year and github-username.

• author-email - sets the maintainer property in cabal
• author-name - sets the author property in cabal and the name used in LICENSE
• category - sets the category property in cabal. This is used in Hackage. For examples of categories see Packages by category. It makes sense for category to be set on a per project basis because it is uncommon for all projects a user creates to belong to the same category. The category can be set per project by passing -p "category:value" to the stack new command.
• copyright - sets the copyright property in cabal. It is typically the name of the holder of the copyright on the package and the year(s) from which copyright is claimed. For example: Copyright (c) 2006-2007 Joe Bloggs
• year - if copyright is not specified, year and author-name are used to generate the copyright property in cabal. If year is not specified, it defaults to the current year.
• github-username - used to generate homepage and source-repository in cabal. For instance github-username: myusername and stack new my-project new-template would result:

homepage: http://github.com/myusername/my-project#readme

source-repository head
  type: git
  location: https://github.com/myusername/my-project

These properties can be set in config.yaml as follows:

templates:
  params:
    author-name: Your Name
    author-email: [email protected]
    category: Your Projects Category
    copyright: 'Copyright (c) 2018 Your Name'
    github-username: yourusername

Additionally, stack new can automatically initialize source control repositories in the directories it creates. Source control tools can be specified with the scm-init option. At the moment, only git is supported.

templates:
  scm-init: git

save-hackage-creds

Controls whether, when using stack upload, the user's Hackage username and password are stored in a local file. Default: true.

save-hackage-creds: true

Since 1.5.0

ignore-revision-mismatch

Cabal files in packages can be specified via exact revisions to deal with Hackage revision metadata. The default behavior of Stack (since 1.6.0) is to fail if an exact match is not found. In some cases (specifically, when using a legacy 00-index.tar.gz file), users may wish to allow a mismatch. In such cases, you can change ignore-revision-mismatch from false to true.

ignore-revision-mismatch: false

For more information, see the Github issue #3520 discussion.

Since 1.6.0

urls

Customize the URLs where stack looks for snapshot build plans.

The default configuration is

urls:
  latest-snapshot: https://www.stackage.org/download/snapshots.json
  lts-build-plans: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fpco/lts-haskell/master/
  nightly-build-plans: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fpco/stackage-nightly/master/

Note: The latest-snapshot-url field has been deprecated in favor of latest-snapshot and will be removed in a future version of stack.

jobs

Specifies how many build tasks should be run in parallel. This can be overloaded on the commandline via -jN, for example -j2. The default is to use the number of processors reported by your CPU. One usage for this might be to avoid running out of memory by setting it to 1, like this:

jobs: 1

work-dir

Specifies relative path of work directory (default is .stack-work. This can also be specified by env var or cli flag, in particular, the earlier items in this list take precedence:

1. --work-dir DIR passed on the commandline
2. work-dir in stack.yaml
3. STACK_WORK environment variable

Since 0.1.10.0

skip-msys

Skips checking for and installing msys2 when stack is setting up the environment. This is only useful on Windows machines, and usually doesn't make sense in project configurations, just in config.yaml. Defaults to false, so if this is used, it only really makes sense to use it like this:

skip-msys: true

Since 0.1.2.0

concurrent-tests

This option specifies whether test-suites should be executed concurrently with each-other. The default for this is true, since this is usually fine and it often means that tests can complete earlier. However, if some test-suites require exclusive access to some resource, or require a great deal of CPU or memory resources, then it makes sense to set this to false (the default is true).

concurrent-tests: false

Since 0.1.2.0

extra-path

This option specifies additional directories to prepend to the PATH environment variable. These will be used when resolving the location of executables, and will also be visible in the PATH variable of processes run by stack.

For example, to prepend /path-to-some-dep/bin to your PATh:

extra-path:
- /path-to-some-dep/bin

One thing to note is that other paths added by stack - things like the project's bin dir and the compiler's bin dir - will take precedence over those specified here (the automatic paths get prepended).

Since 0.1.4.0

local-programs-path

This overrides the location of the programs directory, where tools like ghc and msys get installed.

On most systems, this defaults to a folder called programs within the stack root directory. On windows, if the LOCALAPPDATA environment variable exists, then it defaults to $LOCALAPPDATA/Programs/stack/, which follows windows conventions.

Since 1.3.0

default-template

This option specifies which template to use with stack new, when none is specified. The default is called new-template. The other templates are listed in the stack-templates repo.