Cabal: Installing readline on OSX
26 Apr 2015 • 1 minute readI’ve had trouble installing the readline package on a few separate OSX installations, so I figured it was worth writing the solution down.
When running cabal install for a package which depends on readline (or simply when running cabal install readline), Cabal exits with errors along the lines of
Configuring readline-1.0.3.0...
checking for gcc... gcc
checking for C compiler default output file name... a.out
checking whether the C compiler works... yes
checking whether we are cross compiling... no
checking for suffix of executables...
checking for suffix of object files... o
checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler... yes
checking whether gcc accepts -g... yes
checking for gcc option to accept ISO C89... none needed
checking for GNUreadline.framework... checking for readline... no
checking for tputs in -lncurses... yes
checking for readline in -lreadline... yes
checking for rl_readline_version... yes
checking for rl_begin_undo_group... no
configure: error: readline not found, so this package cannot be built
The problem is that Cabal is not aware of the location of the readline lib. My workaround is to specify the location of the lib whenever running these commands:
$ cabal install readline --extra-include-dirs=/usr/local/Cellar/readline/6.3.8/include/ \
--extra-lib-dirs=/usr/local/Cellar/readline/6.3.8/lib/ \
--configure-option=--with-readline-includes=/usr/local/Cellar/readline/6.3.8/include/readline \
--configure-option=--with-readline-libraries=/usr/local/Cellar/readline/6.3.8/lib/
Your paths may differ slightly if you have a different version of readline installed. You can check this with
$ ls /usr/local/Cellar/readline
6.3.8