Cabal setup

Let us organise our code for this course project. We will be writing a number of Plutus validators and our project can have the same structure as plutus-scripts.

The .cabal file

We start off by creating a new directory and initialising a cabal project.

mkdir hpm-validators && cd hpm-validators
cabal init

This will create a default cabal project structure for us that looks like this:

├── app
│   └── Main.hs
├── CHANGELOG.md
└── hpm-validators.cabal

We will place all our source code in the src/ directory so let's rename the app directory to src. Inspecting the hpm-validators.cabal file shows that the project was initialised as an executable, but we will be building a library of validators so we can change that to a library and specify the hs-source-dirs to src. The rest of the file we can simply copy from the plutus-scripts.cabal template (most notably the build-depends section). Our complete hpm-validators.cabal file looks like this:

cabal-version:      2.4
name:               hpm-validators
version:            0.1.0.0

-- A short (one-line) description of the package.
-- synopsis:

-- A longer description of the package.
-- description:

-- A URL where users can report bugs.
-- bug-reports:

-- The license under which the package is released.
-- license:

-- The package author(s).
-- author:

-- An email address to which users can send suggestions, bug reports, and patches.
-- maintainer:

-- A copyright notice.
-- copyright:
-- category:
extra-source-files: CHANGELOG.md

library
    hs-source-dirs:      src
    exposed-modules:     SimplestSuccess

    build-depends:       aeson
                        , base ^>=4.14.1.0
                        , bytestring
                        , containers
                        , cardano-api
                        , data-default
                        , freer-extras
                        , plutus-contract
                        , plutus-ledger
                        , plutus-ledger-api
                        , plutus-ledger-constraints
                        , plutus-script-utils
                        , plutus-tx-plugin
                        , plutus-tx
                        , text
                        , serialise
  default-language:    Haskell2010
  ghc-options:         -Wall -fobject-code -fno-ignore-interface-pragmas -fno-omit-interface-pragmas -fno-strictness -fno-spec-constr -fno-specialise

Our exposed-modules: exposes SimplestSuccess as that will be the first validator script we write.

Note that there is also an interactive option cabal init -i that you can try out.

The cabal.project file

We do not need to think too much about the cabal.project file. Simply copy the full file from plutus-scripts/cabal.project as it contains all the dependencies we need. For reference, the full file looks like this:

The project structure that we will create in this course looks like this:

PreviousGeneral NotesNextThe Simplest Script

Last updated