Installation

Prerequisites

  • For standalone .hs/.lhs files, ghc must be installed and on the PATH. The easiest way to install it is with ghcup or chocolatey on Windows.

  • For Cabal based projects, both ghc and cabal-install must be installed and on the PATH. It can also be installed with ghcup or chocolatey on Windows.

ghcup

If you are using ghcup to manage your installations, you can install haskell-language-server with

ghcup install hls

You can check if HLS is available for your platform via ghcup here: https://haskell.org/ghcup/install/#supported-platforms.

You can also install HLS from source without checking out the code manually:

ghcup compile hls -v $HLS_VERSION --ghc $GHC_VERSION

More information here: https://www.haskell.org/ghcup/guide/#hls

Installation from source

Direct installation from source, while possible via cabal install exe:haskell-language-server, is not recommended for most people. Said command builds the haskell-language-server binary and installs it in the default cabal binaries folder, but the binary will only work with projects that use the same GHC version that built it.

Common pre-requirements

  • cabal must be in your PATH

    • You need cabal >= 2.4.0.0

  • git must be in your PATH

  • The directory where cabal put the binaries must be in you PATH:

    • For cabal it is by default $HOME/.cabal/bin in Linux and %APPDATA%\cabal\bin in windows.

Tip: you can quickly check if some command is in your path by running the command. If you receive some meaningful output instead of “command not found”-like message then it means you have the command in PATH.

Linux-specific pre-requirements

On Linux you will need install a couple of extra libraries:

Debian 9/Ubuntu 18.04 or earlier:

sudo apt install libicu-dev libtinfo-dev libgmp-dev zlib1g-dev

Debian 10/Ubuntu 18.10 or later:

sudo apt install libicu-dev libncurses-dev libgmp-dev zlib1g-dev

Fedora:

sudo dnf install libicu-devel ncurses-devel zlib-devel

Windows-specific pre-requirements

In order to avoid problems with long paths on Windows you can do either one of the following:

  1. Clone the haskell-language-server to a short path, for example the root of your logical drive (e.g. to C:\hls). Even if you choose C:\haskell-language-server you could hit the problem. If this doesn’t work or you want to use a longer path, try the second option.

  2. If the Local Group Policy Editor is available on your system, go to: Local Computer Policy -> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System -> Filesystem set Enable Win32 long paths to Enabled. If you don’t have the policy editor you can use regedit by using the following instructions here. You also need to configure git to allow longer paths by using unicode paths. To set this for all your git repositories use git config --system core.longpaths true (you probably need an administrative shell for this) or for just this one repository use git config core.longpaths true.

In addition make sure haskell-language-server.exe is not running by closing your editor, otherwise in case of an upgrade the executable can not be installed.

Download the source code

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

chocolatey

If you are using chocolatey to manage your installations in windows, you can install haskell-language-server with

choco install haskell-language-server

Visual Studio Code

If you are using Visual Studio Code, the Haskell extension will automatically download and install haskell-language-server for you.

If you need to find the binaries, please consult the documentation for the extension.

Pre-built binaries

There are pre-built binaries available from the releases page for Linux, Windows and macOS. To install, download the haskell-language-server-wrapper executable for your platform as well as any haskell-language-server executables for the GHC versions you plan on working with, and either put them on your PATH or point your client to them.

Arch Linux

The preferred method of installation for development purposes is to use the haskell-language-server-static package from AUR. This package contains pre-built binaries for each supported GHC version and haskell-language-server-wrapper for automatic GHC version selection. It is updated regularly, requires no additional dependencies, and is independent of other haskell packages you may have on your system, including GHC.

See ArchWiki for the details of Haskell infrastructure on Arch Linux.

Fedora

Binary packages for Fedora are available from this Copr repo, built against the official Fedora ghc package.

FreeBSD

HLS is available for installation from official binary packages. Use

pkg install hs-haskell-language-server

to install it. At the moment, HLS installed this way only supports the same GHC version as the ports one.

Gentoo

Haskell Language Server is available via the Haskell overlay. Follow the instructions here to install the overlay, then run:

emerge -av dev-util/haskell-language-server

Depending on your system setup, you may need to enable the unstable flag for this package before install, and possible also for the dependencies. If you enabled the ~testing versions as explained in the gentoo-haskell overlay instructions, then this won’t be necessary.

Installation from Hackage

Direct installation from Hackage, while possible via cabal install haskell-language-server, is not recommended for most people. Said command builds the haskell-language-server binary and installs it in the default Cabal binaries folder, but the binary will only work with projects that use the same GHC version that built it.

The package can be found here on Hackage: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/haskell-language-server

Installation via Homebrew

Homebrew users can install haskell-language-server using the following command:

brew install haskell-language-server

This formula contains HLS binaries compiled with GHC versions available via Homebrew.

You need to provide your own GHC/Cabal/Stack as required by your project, possibly via Homebrew.

Installation using Nix

You can read full instructions on how to install HLS with Nix in the Nixpkgs manual.