Getting Haskell

You'll need two main tools: the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) and cabal-install, the package installer. The best way to get them is with the Haskell Platform.

If you're on Windows or Mac, download the installers from the Haskell Platform site. For Linux users, most distributions already include the platform in the repositories. On most Debian-based systems, for example, you can just run

sudo apt-get install haskell-platform

Make sure to add $HOME/.cabal/bin to your PATH. Once you're set up, run

cabal update

to download a list of available packages. For more information on Haskell tools, see the tools chapter of the Mezzo Haskell book. Mac users may also want to see this page for help with their PATH setting.

Note: There is a bug in the 64-bit GHC 7.4 for Mac which prevents yesod devel from working correctly. This bug has been corrected in 7.6. However, as 7.4 is still the recommended platform for development, it is advisable to install the 32-bit version of GHC.

Install Yesod

Building Yesod and all of its dependencies is a simple procedure. Just run:

cabal install yesod-platform

Note that this will be installing a large number of packages, and may take a while. (15 minutes on modern systems, up to 40 minutes on older systems.) This is a one time setup, and will have no impact on normal development or runtime performance.

As of Yesod 1.2, you will also need to run:

cabal install yesod-bin

to get the executable.

Start a new site

Now I'm sure you want to test this out! The yesod executable has two important commands.

yesod init

will ask you a few questions, and then generate a scaffolded site for you. Once you change into that directory, type

yesod devel

to start the development server. You can now access your site at http://localhost:3000/.

Learn more

Now it's time to start coding! You can play around with the code right now, or if you want to learn more, check out these resources: