Snap Quick Start Guide

If you haven’t already done so, first go to the download page to find out how to install Snap. The installation generates an executable called snap that you can use to get started with a basic snap project. By default, cabal will install executables to “$HOME/.cabal/bin”. To add cabal to your $PATH, add

PATH=$HOME/.cabal/bin:$PATH

to your ~/.bashrc and run source ~/.bashrc. The following instructions assume that $HOME/.cabal/bin is on your $PATH.

To set up a new Snap project, run the following commands:

$ cabal install snap snap-templates
$ mkdir myproject
$ cd myproject
$ snap init barebones

The snap init command creates a template Snap project in the current directory. If you run snap init with no extra argument, it will create a larger application demonstrating the use of Snap’s higher-level features such as the auth snaplet, heist, etc. You can also do snap init -h to see help about other project templates that are available. For now we’ll focus on the barebones project.

The Main module for this project will be created in src/Main.hs. When you build this project with cabal install, an executable is created in $HOME/.cabal/bin called myproject. To build and run the example application, run the following commands:

$ cabal install
$ myproject -p 8000

Now point your web browser to http://localhost:8000/; you should see a simple response string.

To activate dynamic recompilation in your project, rebuild your application with “cabal clean; cabal install -fdevelopment”. This won’t work with the barebones project that we created above. You have to create your project with “snap init” instead.

For more information, continue on to the Snap API tutorial or take a look at the Snap reference documentation.