cabal-module(5)

cabal-module5

Devel/cabal port module for building haskell programs

Overview

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.

Dependency manifest

Hackage dependencies are listed in MODCABAL_MANIFEST as space separate triples of package version revision. 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.

Examples

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

Releases

13 releases since OpenBSD 6.9; the text changed 2 times.

  1. 6.9
  2. 7.0–7.7
  3. 7.8–8.0

From man 8.0-current-20261101 in OpenBSD 8.0-current (2026-11-01). Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.