Reproducible Tutorials with Stack
Stack yields some nice benefits for blogging, tutorials, and more. The main benefit I want to talk about today is reproducibility when using stack to start a new project (in a tutorial).
To ensure repeatable resolutions, choose a specific resolver. Since even the nightlies get unique identifiers, we can ensure that any future attempt at reproducing a given tutorial is more likely to be successful.
Stack can use templates from github. Pointing to a specific template, whether custom or from the stack-templates repo, is good as well. Cloning git repos could be used as an alternative here, but one advantage of using Stack's support is that you can now have a single repo of templates and point to a specific git commit/file.
A fully qualified reproducible template commmand could look like:
stack new servant-users \https://raw.githubusercontent.com/commercialhaskell/stack-templates/9a18e8762b8f048d403dabe5c19552ceb5292318/servant.hsfiles \--resolver nightly-2016-04-10
-- note
Effectively, doing this is trying to freeze the (Hackage) world at a specific point in time for a specific .cabal setup. I'd argue that doing this is more useful (for tutorials) than trying to make sure a tutorial compiles with any arbitrary future set of packages.