elm-freebsd

These are tools for building Elm on FreeBSD. There are two main ways to use them: building locally for personal use and building a package for distribution.

Building locally

In order to bootstrap GHC 7.10, you'll need a few packages installed:

pkg install ca_root_nss compat8x-amd64 gcc gmake perl5 libiconv

For Elm 0.18, you'll also need git.

From here, the makefile will download and install the necessary versions of GHC and Cabal and then use them to build Elm. The default target is elm-0.19, but elm-0.18 is also supported.

make

Four makefile variables allow you to customize the build/install directories:

• BUILD_PATH: Scratch directory for building GHC and Cabal.
• LOCAL_PATH: Prefix directory for installing GHC and Cabal.
• ELM_PREFIX: Directory for building Elm 0.18. This is ignored by 0.19.
• PREFIX: Standard prefix directory for installing (or symlinking) the Elm binaries.

The default values are equivalent to:

make BUILD_PATH=$PWD/build \
     LOCAL_PATH=$PWD/local \
     ELM_PREFIX=$HOME/.local/share/elm \
     PREFIX=$HOME/.local

If you want to see what make is going to do before you jump in, just run make -n. To clean up, you can run make clean or, more specifically, make clean-ghc and make clean-elm.

Building the package

If you want a package to install on other systems, run pkg.sh as root. This will install GHC and Cabal to /tmp and produce a package archive in ./dist/. Elm 0.18 will be built in /usr/local/elm and symlinked to /usr/local/bin/elm*; Elm 0.19 only has one binary, which will be built directly into /usr/local/bin. The version, build prefix, and maintainer email can be configured; here are all options with their current defaults:

./pkg.sh -v 0.19 -p /usr/local/elm -m [email protected]

(The -p option is ignored in this case, as 0.19 does not require it.)

For 0.18, I recommend running pkg.sh in a clean jail to avoid cluttering up your machine with build artifacts; the package will only contain the Elm binaries from /usr/local/elm/Elm-Platform/0.18/.cabal-sandbox/bin, plus symlinks. 0.19 has a much cleaner build system that will only pollute /tmp.

You can install the package on another jail/machine with

pkg add <path-or-url-to-pkg>

The package is named elm-lang, with a (spurious) origin of lang/elm.