2.2. Installing on Windows

2.2.1. Installing GHC on Windows

To install GHC, use the following steps:

• Download the Installshield setup.exe from the GHC download page haskell.org.

• Run setup.exe. (If you have a previous version of GHC, Installshield will offer to "modify", or "remove" GHC. Choose "remove"; then run setup.exe a second time. This time it should offer to install.)

  At this point you should find GHCi and the GHC documentation are available in your Start menu under "Start/Programs/Glasgow Haskell Compiler".

• The final dialogue box from the install process tells you where GHC has been installed. If you want to invoke GHC from a command line, add this to your PATH environment variable. Usually, GHC installs into c:/ghc/ghc-5.02, though the last part of this path depends on which version of GHC you are installing, of course. You need to add c:/ghc/ghc-5.02/bin to your path if yo

• GHC needs a directory in which to create, and later delete, temporary files. It uses the standard Windows procedure GetTempPath() to find a suitable directory. This procedure returns:

  • The path in environment variable TMP, if TMP is set.

  • Otherwise, the path in environment variable TEMP, if TEMP is set.

  • Otherwise, there is a per-user default which varies between versions of Windows. On NT and XP-ish versions, it might be: c:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Temp

  The main point is that if you don't do anything GHC will work fine; but if you want to control where the directory is, you can do so by setting TMP or TEMP.

• To test the fruits of your labour, try now to compile a simple Haskell program:

  bash$ cat main.hs module Main(main) where main = putStrLn "Hello, world!" bash$ ghc -o main main.hs .. bash$ ./main Hello, world! bash$

You do not need the Cygwin toolchain, or anything else, to install and run GHC.

An installation of GHC requires about 140M of disk space. To run GHC comfortably, your machine should have at least 64M of memory.

2.2.2. Moving GHC around

At the moment, GHC installs in a fixed place (c:/ghc/ghc-x.yy, but once it is installed, you can freely move the entire GHC tree just by copying the ghc-x.yy directory. (You may need to fix up the links in "Start/Programs/Glasgow Haskell Compiler" if you do this.)

It is OK to put GHC tree in a directory whose path involves spaces. However, don't do this if you use want to use GHC with the Cygwin tools, because Cygwin can get confused when this happpens. We havn't quite got to the bottom of this, but so far as we know it's not a problem with GHC itself. Nevertheless, just to keep life simple we usually put GHC in a place with a space-free path.

2.2.3. Installing ghc-win32 FAQ