Idris on Ubuntu

This page details installation instructions for Idris 1 on Ubuntu. These instructions have been tested on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS/Idris 1.3.0 and Ubunutu 19.10/Idris 1.3.2.

To install Idris on Ubuntu we'll need a Haskell environment first. To obtain a Haskell environment, follow the instructions on haskell.org.

Haskell Environment

The Idris compiler is written in Haskell, so we need the Haskell compiler 'GHC' installed.

sudo apt-get install cabal-install

Once this has been installed we then download a list of the latest available packages from Hackage:

cabal update

You may now wish to add $HOME/.cabal/bin to your $PATH (typically by editing your .profile, .bash_profile or .bashrc files), so that executables installed by cabal will be on your path.

For Ubuntu 16.04

The above method doesn't work as the cabal-install packaged with Ubuntu 16.04 segfaults during the configuration step. It also segfaults when installing cabal-install from Hackage, so it can't upgrade to a version that works.

One workaround is to use stack instead.

Another is to add the GHC PPA to your apt sources and install cabal-install-2.0 from there, and then add /opt/cabal/bin to the PATH. Also add $HOME/.cabal/bin to the PATH as above.

Idris

cabal install idris

Once install the Idris executable will be available at ~/.cabal/bin/idris.

Linking/memory problems

If you run out of memory while attempting to link Idris, try using ld.gold, by doing:

sudo apt-get install binutils-gold
cabal install idris --with-ld=ld.gold

If you get an error with zlib, zlib-0.6.1.2 failed during the configure step. The exception was: ExitFailure 1, add supporting packages:

sudo apt-get install zlibc zlib1g-dev