Contributing guidelines

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Building

Clone the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/haskell/haskell-language-server

The project can then be built with both cabal build and stack build.

Using Cabal

# If you have not run `cabal update` in a while
$ cabal update
# Then
$ cabal build

Using Stack

$ stack build

Using Nix

The instructions below show how to set up a Cachix binary cache and open a nix shell for local development.

$ cachix use haskell-language-server
$ nix-shell
$ cabal update
$ cabal build

Flakes support

If you are using nix 2.4 style command (enabled by experimental-features = nix-command), you can use nix develop instead of nix-shell to enter the development shell. To enter the shell with specific GHC versions:

  • nix develop or nix develop .#haskell-language-server-dev - default GHC version

  • nix develop .#haskell-language-server-901-dev - GHC 9.0.1 (substitute GHC version as appropriate)

If you are looking for a Nix expression to create haskell-language-server binaries, see https://github.com/haskell/haskell-language-server/issues/122

To create binaries:

  • nix build or nix build .#haskell-language-server - default GHC version

  • nix build .#haskell-language-server-901 - GHC 9.0.1 (substitute GHC version as appropriate)

Testing

The tests make use of the Tasty test framework.

There are two test suites in the main haskell-language-server package, functional tests, and wrapper tests. Some of the wrapper tests expect stack to be present on the system, or else they fail. Other project packages, like the core library or plugins, can have their own test suite.

Testing with Cabal

Running all the tests

$ cabal test

Running just the functional tests

$ cabal test func-test

Running just the wrapper tests

$ cabal test wrapper-test

Running a subset of tests

Tasty supports providing Patterns as command line arguments, to select the specific tests to run.

$ cabal test func-test --test-option "-p hlint"

The above recompiles everything every time you use a different test option though.

An alternative, which only recompiles when tests (or dependencies) change:

$ cabal run haskell-language-server:func-test -- -p "hlint enables"

Using HLS on HLS code

Project source code should load without hie.yaml setup.

In other cases:

  1. Check if hie.yaml (& hie.yml) files left from previous configurations.

  2. If the main project needs special configuration, note that other internal subprojects probably also would need configuration.

To create an explicit configuration for all projects - use implicit-hie generator directly:

gen-hie > hie.yaml  # into the main HLS directory

that configuration should help.

  1. Inspect & tune configuration explicitly.

Configuring project build applies to HLS project source code loading just as to any other.

Note: HLS may implicitly detect codebase as a Stack project (see hie-bios implicit configuration documentation). To use Cabal, try creating an hie.yaml file:

cradle:
  cabal:

Manually testing your hacked HLS

If you want to test HLS while hacking on it, follow the steps below.

To do once:

  • Open some codebase on which you want to test your hacked HLS in your favorite editor (it can also be HLS codebase itself: see previous section for configuration)

  • Configure this editor to use your custom HLS executable

    • With Cabal:

      • On Unix systems: cabal exec which haskell-language-server

      • On Windows: cabal exec where haskell-language-server

    • With Stack: $(stack path --dist-dir)/build/haskell-language-server/haskell-language-server

To do every time you change HLS code and want to test it:

  • Build HLS

    • With Cabal: cabal build exe:haskell-language-server

    • With Stack: stack build haskell-language-server:exe:haskell-language-server

  • Restart HLS

    • With VS Code: Haskell: Restart Haskell LSP Server

    • With Emacs: lsp-workspace-restart

Style guidelines

The project includes a .editorconfig file with the editor basic settings used by the project. However, most editors will need some action to honour those settings automatically. For example vscode needs to have installed a specific extension. Please, try to follow those basic settings to keep the codebase as uniform as possible.

Formatter pre-commit hook

We are using pre-commit to configure git pre-commit hook for formatting. Although it is possible to run formatting manually, we recommend you to use it to set pre-commit hook as our CI checks pre-commit hook is applied or not.

If you are using Nix or Gitpod, pre-commit hook is automatically installed. Otherwise, follow instructions on https://pre-commit.com/ to install the pre-commit tool, then run the following command:

pre-commit install

Why some components are excluded from automatic formatting?

  • test/testdata and test/data are there as we want to test formatting plugins.

  • hie-compat is there as we want to keep its code as close to GHC as possible.

  • hls-tactics-plugin is there as the main contributor of the plugin (@isovector) does not want auto-formatting.

Introduction tutorial

See the tutorial on writing a plugin in HLS.

Measuring, benchmarking and tracing

Metrics

When ghcide is built with the ekg flag, HLS opens a metrics server on port 8999 exposing GC and ghcide metrics. The ghcide metrics currently exposed are:

  • ghcide.values_count - count of build results in the store

  • ghcide.database_count - count of build keys in the store (these two would be the same in the absence of GC)

  • ghcide.build_count - build count. A key is GC’ed if it is dirty and older than 100 builds

  • ghcide.dirty_keys_count - non transitive count of dirty build keys

  • ghcide.indexing_pending_count - count of items in the indexing queue

  • ghcide.exports_map_count - count of identifiers in the exports map.

Benchmarks

If you are touching performance sensitive code, take the time to run a differential benchmark between HEAD and master using the benchHist script. This assumes that “master” points to the upstream master.

Run the benchmarks with cabal bench.

It should take around 25 minutes and the results will be stored in the bench-results folder. To interpret the results, see the comments in the bench/Main.hs module.

More details in bench/README

Tracing

HLS records opentelemetry eventlog traces via opentelemetry. To generate the traces, build with -eventlog and run with +RTS -l. To visualize the traces, install Tracy and use eventlog-to-tracy to open the generated eventlog.

Adding support for a new editor

Adding support for new editors is fairly easy if the editor already has good support for generic LSP-based extensions. In that case, there will likely be an editor-specific support system for this (like lsp-mode for Emacs). This will typically provide instructions for how to support new languages.

In some cases you may need to write a small bit of additional client support, or expose a way for the user to set the server’s configuration options and for them to configure how the server is started.

Building the docs

The docs are built with Sphinx and ReadTheDocs, the documentation for both is helpful.

To build the docs you need to install some Python prerequisites. You can either pip install -r docs/requirements.txt, or simply enter a nix-shell.

Then to build and preview the docs:

cd docs
make html
firefox _build/html/index.html

Alternatively, you can build the entire thing as a Nix derivation from the flake with nix build .#docs.

The docs are also built and previewed on every PR, so you can check them from the PR status.

Working on code actions

To make HLS easier to maintain, please follow these design guidelines when adding or modifying code actions:

  1. Prefer ghc-exactprint to manual text parsing.

  2. Prefer ghc-exactprint to manual code generation.

  3. Code generating actions should not try to format the generated code. Assume that the user is also leveraging HLS for automated code formatting.

  4. Put new code actions in their own plugin unless they are very closely aligned with an existing ghcide code action.

Sponsorship

If you want to contribute financially you can do so via open-collective. In the past the funding has been used to sponsor summer student projects.