Idris on Ubuntu

This page details installation instructions for Idris on Ubuntu. These instructions have been tested on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Idris 1.3.0.

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, 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.

Idris

cabal install idris

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

Caveat

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