Haskell executable not added to path in nix-shell

Help
1

I’m trying to start a nix shell with citeproc using:

nix-shell -p 'haskellPackages.citeproc' --run 'citeproc -h'

But this fails with:

/private/tmp/nix-shell-69925-0/rc: line 3: citeproc: command not found

I also tried the following version that I found in a StackOverflow post:

nix-shell -p 'haskell.lib.justStaticExecutables haskellPackages.citeproc' --run 'citeproc -h'

But it also fails with command not found

A few details:

  • aarch64-darwin
  • nix 2.9.1

Am I doing something wrong here?

Thank you for your help!

2

Upstream disalbes the citeproc executable by default, it seems. This probably changed in some release since the stackoverflow post you are talking about. As it is just gated behind a cabal flag, it can be relatively easily be flicked on. It does require extra dependencies, so the magic invocation becomes quite lengthy:

nix-shell -p "with haskell.lib.compose; justStaticExecutables (addBuildDepends [ haskellPackages.aeson-pretty haskellPackages.text-icu ] (enableCabalFlag \"executable\" haskellPackages.citeproc))"

We should probably provide a better way to obtain the executable, either via a bin output or separate attribute. Feel free to open a bug report about this in the nixpkgs repository and tagging @NixOS/haskell.

3 Likes
3

Thank you! That solution works for me.

I opened an issue about exposing the executable in a friendlier way here.