CABAL-MODULE(5) File Formats Manual CABAL-MODULE(5)

cabal-module — devel/cabal port module for building Haskell programs

This manual page documents the behavior of setting MODULES=devel/cabal in the ports(7) tree.

Uses cabal(1) to automate packaging Haskell binary projects. During fetch, the dependent packages enumerated in MODCABAL_MANIFEST are downloaded into the hackage subdirectory of DIST_SUBDIR. During post-extract, the dependency sources are unpacked into WORKDIR. Special care is taken to replace .cabal files if they are updated post-release on hackage. A custom cabal.project.local file gets created to direct cabal(1) to the extracted packages and prevent any network interaction. In rare cases a custom cabal.project is required. This module automatically copies such files from port's files into WRKSRC. During build, cabal(1) is invoked to build the executables listed in MODCABAL_EXECUTABLES.

lang/ghc and devel/cabal-install are added to BUILD_DEPENDS. This module uses SITES.hs to download the sources from hackage.

This module parameters:

MODCABAL_STEM
Name of the package on hackage (required).
MODCABAL_VERSION
Version of the package (required).
MODCABAL_MANIFEST
Hackage dependencies required by this package, see below.
MODCABAL_DATA_DIR
data-dir from .cabal file (if executable needs this)
MODCABAL_REVISION
Numeric revision of .cabal file on hackage if one is needed on top of .cabal file contained in the .tar.gz file.
MODCABAL_BUILD_ARGS
passed to cabal v2-build
MODCABAL_FLAGS
custom feature --flags for cabal(1).
MODCABAL_EXECUTABLES
Executable target in .cabal file, defaults to hackage package name in MODCABAL_STEM.

This module adds currently adds no make(1) targets.

Hackage dependencies are listed in MODCABAL_MANIFEST as space separate triples of . They correspond to the main package values of MODCABAL_STEM MODCABAL_VERSION MODCABAL_REVISION.

The contents of MODCABAL_MANIFEST is normally generated by devel/cabal-bundler which creates a working build plan from hackage dependency information.

To create a new Haskell binary port one would install cabal-bundler port, look up the chosen package version number on hackage. E.g.

$ cabal-bundler --openbsd cpphs-1.20

cabal(1), port-modules(5)

August 16, 2025 Debian