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. The Idris build also needs make.

sudo apt-get install cabal-install make

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