sandman helps manage Cabal sandboxes so that you can avoid rebuilding packages that you use often.

It does so by managing a global collection of sandboxes that were built separately. You can mix any number of these sandboxes into the package database for your project-specific sandbox.

Usage: sandman COMMAND Available options: -h,--help Show this help text Available commands: list List sandman sandboxes or the packages in them new Create a new sandman sandbox destroy Delete a sandman sandbox install Install a new package mix Mix a sandman sandbox into the current project clean Remove all mixed sandboxes from the current project 

Example usage

First, we create a sandbox that will contain packages we commonly use for development.

$ sandman list lens (25 packages) $ sandman new common [..] Created sandbox common. 

Managed sandboxes can be told to use specific versions of GHC. This information will be propagated to projects with which this sandbox is mixed.

$ sandman new common --with-ghc ghc-7.6.3 

We install our commonly used packages

$ sandman install common classy-prelude [..] Configuring classy-prelude-0.10.2... Building classy-prelude-0.10.2... Installed classy-prelude-0.10.2 $ sandman list lens (25 packages) common (45 packages) $ sandman list common [..] classy-prelude-0.10.2 [..] $ sandman destroy lens Removed sandbox lens. $ sandman list common (45 packages) $ sandman install common optparse-applicative aeson 

Next, we mix it into an existing project.

$ cd my_project $ cabal sandbox init $ cabal sandbox hc-pkg list | grep classy-prelude <nothing> $ sandman mix common Mixing 45 new packages into package DB at [..] Rebuilding package cache. $ cabal sandbox hc-pkg list | grep classy-prelude classy-prelude-0.10.2 $ cabal repl GHCi, version 7.8.3: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ :? for help Loading package ghc-prim ... linking ... done. Loading package integer-gmp ... linking ... done. Loading package base ... linking ... done. λ> import ClassyPrelude λ> $ sandman clean Removing all mixed sandboxes. Removed 45 packages. Rebuilding package cache. 

sandman can also mix in only specific packages and their dependencies from managed sandboxes.

$ sandman mix common --only system-filepath --only system-fileio Mixing 3 new packages into package DB at [..] Rebuilding package cache. $ cabal sandbox hc-pkg list [..] system-fileio-0.3.16 system-filepath-0.4.13.1 text-1.2.0.4 

The --executables option may be used to include executables from a sandbox.

$ sandman mix common --executables --only hspec Mixing 15 new packages into package DB at [..] Rebuilding package cache. $ ls .cabal-sandbox/bin hspec-discover 

Stack

sandman also supports mixing in packages from a stack snapshot package database.

$ sandman mix stack 

This mixes in all packages from the default snapshot database into the current Cabal sandbox. The -o/--only options may be used to limit the packages to a minimal subset.

$ sandman mix stack -o text 

Status

Sandman is stable enough for basic use cases but there are surely a lot of unexplored corner cases. Feel free to try it out. Keep in mind that since you're breaking sandbox boundaries, there is a higher chance of running into version conflicts.

Installation

You can download and install sandman from Hackage by using,

$ cabal install sandman 

Or if you would rather not pollute your global package database, install it into a sandbox and copy the executable somewhere on your $PATH.

$ mkdir tmp && cd tmp $ cabal sandbox init $ cabal install sandman $ cp .cabal-sandbox/bin/sandman ~/bin 

Or simply use stack:

$ stack install sandman