So you want to build git-annex from source. This is encouraged for users with experience building code from source. But the build may require some care and feeding. This page will start with the easy methods and work up to the harder ones.

prerequisites

Start by installing the Haskell Platform.

In Debian, this is as simple as:

sudo apt-get install haskell-platform

downloading the source code

The easiest way is using git; see download or just:

git clone git://git-annex.branchable.com/ git-annex

Or, you can use cabal to get the source code:

cabal update; cabal unpack git-annex

building from source on Debian

This is the method used by git-annex's author, and so it's the one most likely to work without problems.

First, install everything git-annex needs to build:

sudo apt-get build-dep git-annex

Now you can build git-annex by running either make or cabal build inside the source tree.

minimal build with cabal and stackage

This can be done anywhere, and builds git-annex without some optional features that require harder-to-install C libraries. This is plenty to let you get started with git-annex, but it does not include the assistant or webapp.

Be warned that this involves building a lot of Haskell libraries from source, and so it has a lot of moving parts, and it's not uncommon for it to be broken from time to time. A nice way to avoid such breakage is to configure cabal to use the Stackage repository, which is a more stable and consistent version of the Hackage repository.

Inside the source tree, run:

cabal install -j -f"-assistant -webapp -webdav -pairing -xmpp -dns" --only-dependencies
cabal configure -f"-assistant -webapp -webdav -pairing -xmpp -dns"
cabal build -j
PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH
cabal install --bindir=$HOME/bin

full build with cabal and stackage

To build with all features enabled, including the assistant and webapp, you will need to install several C libraries and their headers, including libgnutls, libgsasl, libxml2, and zlib. How to do that for your OS is beyond the scope of this page.

Using Stackage is again a good idea here!

Once the C libraries are installed, run inside the source tree:

cabal install -j --only-dependencies
cabal configure
cabal build -j
PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH
cabal install --bindir=$HOME/bin

EKG

When building with cabal, you can optionally enable the EKG monitoring interface. This is great for debugging resource usage problems. Just pass -f+EKG to cabal configure