I recently finished the Building Projects & Testing chapters in the Haskell Book. I am also working on a project to scrape a website in Haskell. This means I’ll need to use libraries that other people have written to accomplish scraping, creating a webapp, & testing my application unless I want to write all that myself (I don’t).
I’ve been having trouble differentiating between Packages & Modules and where to put them so that my project will compile. I always seem to not know the module name or have the wrong capitalization, resulting in projects not compiling. It’s not clear if there’s a naming convention or if I’m missing something else.
Making a Project Compile
I’m going to use QuickCheck & hspec as examples.
I’m only covering how to get files to compile, not the intricacies of packages & modules.
You’ve made a new project with stack
stack new example
Great!
Open the package.yaml & you’ll see a bunch of stanzas generated for you. We’ll want to add our test packages to the tests stanza.
Here’s how that looks:
tests:
example-test:
main: Spec.hs
source-dirs: test
ghc-options:
- -threaded
- -rtsopts
- -with-rtsopts=-N
dependencies:
- example
- QuickCheck
- hspec
The next part is adding these libraries to our source files so we can use them! Since QuickCheck and hspec are dependencies only for the Spec.hs file we’ll want to add our module imports there.
Module names do not have to be the same as package names. We can go the hackage page for QuickCheck or hspec & if you scroll down to the Modules section you can see the exact name with capitalization.
In our Spec.hs file, we’ll want to add the imports to the top of the file. It will look like this (if you keep the default generated code):
import Test.QuickCheck
import Test.Hspec
main :: IO ()
main = putStrLn "Test suite not yet implemented"
To see, run your test suite & download all the packages, you’ll run the stack test command in your terminal. It will show all the packages getting downloaded & the output of the test suite being not implemented.
If you’re adding packages to the executable stanza of your package.yaml you’ll also just import the modules to the top of your Main.hs file (by default) and to run the project you’ll run the stack exec example-exe command.
Making a File Compile (Loading Packages in GHCi)
Alright so you’re working in just one file. Or maybe you want to experiment a bit with a package.
Do you really need to set up a project to get packages in scope? Nah.
If you have your module imports at the top of your file & want to load it in GHCi, you’ll get an error saying:
"Failed to load interface for $MODULE_NAME"
for all your modules not in scope.
Before you load your REPL session, you can run
stack ghci QuickCheck hspec
or a list of whatever packages you need to load your file. In your REPL session, you’ll need to import the modules you want to use there too. Then when you try loading the file it will work great!
If your GHC prompt is using the default settings the modules will be listed in your session prompt character. To prevent this from cluttering up your GHCi session you can either
` import qualified Test.QuickCheck as Q ` & prefix all your QuickCheck functions names with Q.func like Q.arbitrary
or
` :set prompt “>” ` & your prompt will remain “>” for the rest of your session.
Loading packages and importing the modules into your GHCi session is also really useful for doing development inside the REPL. You can look at the types of functions in the package or ask for more information. I’ve found that developing in smaller chunks in the REPL leads me to write better functions overall.