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Installation Instructions

These instructions are aimed at readers of Real World OCaml, though much of what you find here will be useful for anyone who wants to get a good working OCaml installation.

At the highest level, here's what you need to do:

• Get OPAM installed
• Build OCaml 4.01 or later using OPAM
• With OPAM, install the key libraries that you need to work through the examples in the book
• Install Utop, a modern interactive toplevel with command history, tab completion, and defaults that are tuned to work with the examples in Real World OCaml,
• Set up your editing environment.
• Optionally install merlin, a tool for providing IDE-like functionality like auto-completion, as well as ocp-indent, a source code indenter. Both work with emacs and vim, and can be adapted to other editors.

Note that Windows is not currently supported by the examples in Real World OCaml or by OPAM, although it is being worked on. Until that's ready, we recommend using a virtual machine running Debian Linux on your local machine.

Let's get started.

Getting OPAM

The easiest way to install OPAM is through your OS's package manager. In most cases, installing OPAM will also trigger the installation of OCaml. The version installed isn't important, since we can use OPAM itself to install other versions of the compiler.

Here are platform-specific instructions.

Mac OS X

If you don't already have a package manager set up, try installing homebrew. You can find information on installing homebrew here. make sure you have the latest XCode (and Command Line Tools for XCode) installed from the App Store first.

You can then install OPAM using brew.

$ brew install opam

(NB: If you're using Mountain Lion or lower, you may need to use brew install opam --without-aspcud, instead)

Another popular package manager on Mac OS X is MacPorts, which also has an OPAM package.

$ sudo port install opam

Ubuntu Linux

Ubuntu has have a PPA (Personal Package Archive) that you can use for installing OPAM as a binary package.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:avsm/ppa
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install curl build-essential m4 ocaml opam

Ubuntu 14.04

14.04 comes with recent versions of ocaml and opam. No PPA needed.

$ sudo apt-get install curl build-essential m4 zlib1g-dev libssl-dev ocaml ocaml-native-compilers opam

Debian Linux

Debian's OCaml packages aren't yet at 4.01.0, and so you will need to compile it from sources. If you are using the unstable (sid) stream, then OPAM will be available. On Wheezy, you need to compile OPAM from source (see the instructions below).

Arch Linux

OPAM is available from the AUR (Arch User Repository). You can install OPAM usingyaourt:

$ sudo yaourt -S opam

Or directly using pacman.

$ sudo pacman -S base-devel
$ wget https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/op/opam/opam.tar.gz
$ tar -xvf opam.tar.gz && cd opam
$ makepkg
$ sudo pacman -U opam-.pkg.tar.xz

Building from source

On platforms not listed above, you'll need to install OPAM from source, and to do that you'll need OCaml installed first. Some platforms, including Fedora Linux, have OCaml packages that you can install but not OPAM packages. You can build OPAM on OCaml version 3.12.1 or later.

To install OCaml from source, you'll first need a C compiler, generally gcc or llvm.

The following is enough to get OCaml installed on most platforms.

$ curl -OL https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/archive/4.01.tar.gz
$ tar -zxvf 4.01.tar.gz
$ cd ocaml-4.01
$ ./configure
$ make world world.opt
$ sudo make install

If you have problems with any of the above, read the INSTALL file in the tar file.

Installing OCaml locally

The installation step described above requires administrator privileges. You can also install it in your home directory by passing the prefix option to the configuration script:

$ ./configure -prefix $HOME/my-ocaml

Once the installation is completed into this custom location, you will need to add $HOME/my-ocaml/bin to your PATH, normally by editing ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile. You shouldn't really do this unless you have special reasons, so try to install binary packages before trying a source installation.

Installing OPAM

If the binary packages aren't available for your system, you'll need to install the latest OPAM release from source. You can follow the online quick install guide.

Configuring OPAM

The entire OPAM package database is held in the .opam directory in your home directory, including compiler installations. On Linux and Mac OS X, this will be the ~/.opam directory, which means you don't need administrative privileges to configure it. If you run into problems configuring OPAM, just delete the whole ~/.opam directory and start over.

Let's begin by initialising the OPAM package database. This will ask you a few interactive questions at the end. It's safe to answer yes to these unless you want to manually control the configuration steps yourself as an advanced user.

$ opam init
<...>
=-=-=-= Configuring OPAM =-=-=-=
Do you want to update your configuration to use OPAM ? [Y/n] y
[1/4] Do you want to update your shell configuration file ? [default: ~/.profile] y
[2/4] Do you want to update your ~/.ocamlinit ? [Y/n] y
[3/4] Do you want to install the auto-complete scripts ? [Y/n] y
[4/4] Do you want to install the `opam-switch-eval` script ? [Y/n] y
User configuration:
  ~/.ocamlinit is already up-to-date.
  ~/.profile is already up-to-date.
Gloabal configuration:
  Updating /opam-init/init.sh
    auto-completion : [true]
    opam-switch-eval: [true]
  Updating /opam-init/init.zsh
    auto-completion : [true]
    opam-switch-eval: [true]
  Updating /opam-init/init.csh
    auto-completion : [true]
    opam-switch-eval: [true]

You only need to run this command once, and it will create the ~/.opam directory and sync with the latest package list from the online OPAM database.

When the init command finishes, you'll see some instructions about environment variables. OPAM never installs files into your system directories (which would require administrator privileges). Instead, it puts them into your home directory by default, and can output a set of shell commands which configures your shell with the right PATH variables so that packages will just work.

If you choose not to follow the OPAM instructions to add itself to your shell profile, you can still configure it on-the-fly in your current shell with just one command.

$ eval `opam config env`

This evaluates the results of running opam config env in your current shell and sets the variables so that subsequent commands will use them. This only works with your current shell and it can only be automated for future shells by adding the line to your login scripts. On Mac OS X you should typically use ~/.profile, and ~/.bashrc on most Linux setups.

OPAM isn't unusual in this approach; the SSH ssh-agent also works similarly, so if you're having any problems just hunt around in your configuration scripts to see how that's being invoked.

If you answered yes to the auto-complete scripts question during opam init, this should have all been set up for you. You can verify this worked by seeing if theOCAML_TOPLEVEL_PATH environment variable is set. You can do this in bash as follows.

$ printenv OCAML_TOPLEVEL_PATH
/Users/myusername/.opam/4.01.0/lib/toplevel

The next step is to make sure we have the right compiler version installed.

$ opam switch
system  C system                      System compiler (4.00.1)
--     -- 3.11.2                      Official 3.11.2 release
--     -- 3.12.1                      Official 3.12.1 release
--     -- 4.00.0                      Official 4.00.0 release
--     -- 4.00.1                      Official 4.00.1 release
--     -- 4.01.0                      Official 4.01.0 release

If, as in this case, your system compiler is older than 4.01.0, you should install a more up to date version of the compiler, as shown below.

$ opam switch 4.01.0
$ eval `opam config env`

The switch itself will take around ten or fifteen minutes on a modern machine, and will download and install the OCaml compiler within the ~/.opam directory). You can install multiple compilers at once, and switching between them once they're installed is fast.

The new compiler and all libraries associated with it will be installed in ~/.opam/4.01.0.

Finally, we're ready to install the libraries and tools we'll need for the book. The most important ones are core, which provides the standard library that all the examples in the book are based on, and utop, which is the interactive toplevel that you can use for working through the examples.

$ opam install core utop

This will take about five or ten minutes to build, and will install the requested packages along with a bunch of dependencies. But there are other libraries that will be useful as you go through the book that you might as well install now.

$ opam install \
   async yojson core_extended core_bench \
   cohttp async_graphics cryptokit menhir

If some of the above don't work, don't worry too much. Most of them come up in only a few places in the book. (There are some known problems right now: in particular,core_extended doesn't install cleanly on recent versions of OS X, due to an issue with there2 library it depends on. That is expected to be resolved soon.)

Note that if you've installed utop and can't launch it from the shell, make sure you've runeval `opam config env` in this shell. In general, you should just get this set up as part of your shell init scripts, as described earlier.

Setting up and using utop

When you first run utop, you'll find yourself at an interactive prompt with a bar at the bottom of the screen. The bottom bar dynamically updates as you write text, and contains the possible names of modules or variables that are valid at that point in the phrase you are entering. You can press the  key to complete the phrase with the first choice.

The ~/.ocamlinit file in your home directory initializes utop with common libraries and syntax extensions so you don't need to type them in every time. Given that you have Core installed, you should update your ocamlinit to load Core every time you start utop, by adding the following lines.

#use "topfind";;
#thread;;
#camlp4o;;
#require "core.top";;
#require "core.syntax";;

For utop only you could get away with just the last two lines, but you need the whole thing if you want the traditional ocaml toplevel to work too.

Note that opam will have already added some lines to the file. Also, notice that # is used to mark a toplevel directive, not a comment.

If you want to use Core as your primary standard library, then you should open the Core.Stdmodule by default, which you can do by appending the following to the end of your.ocamlinit.

open Core.Std

When you run utop with these initialization rules, it should start up with Core opened and ready to use. If you don't open Core.Std by default, then you must remember to open it before running any of the interactive examples in the book.

Editors

Emacs

These instructions have been tested on emacs 24.2 and should work for that version and newer. There are some reports of problems with earlier emacsen.

tuareg is the most commonly used mode for editing OCaml code in emacs. You can download it here. You should download it and untar it into some subdirectory of your home directory.

Once you've done that, you can add the following rather lengthy snippet to your .emacs file.

;; -- common-lisp compatibility if not added earlier in your .emacs
(require 'cl)

;; -- Tuareg mode -----------------------------------------
;; Add Tuareg to your search path
(add-to-list
 'load-path
 ;; Change the path below to be wherever you've put your tuareg installation.
 (expand-file-name "~/lib/elisp/tuareg"))
(require 'tuareg)
(setq auto-mode-alist 
      (append '(("\\.ml[ily]?$" . tuareg-mode))
          auto-mode-alist))

;; -- Tweaks for OS X -------------------------------------
;; Tweak for problem on OS X where Emacs.app doesn't run the right
;; init scripts when invoking a sub-shell
(cond
 ((eq window-system 'ns) ; macosx
  ;; Invoke login shells, so that .profile or .bash_profile is read
  (setq shell-command-switch "-lc")))

;; -- opam and utop setup --------------------------------
;; Setup environment variables using opam
(dolist
   (var (car (read-from-string
           (shell-command-to-string "opam config env --sexp"))))
 (setenv (car var) (cadr var)))
;; Update the emacs path
(setq exec-path (split-string (getenv "PATH") path-separator))
;; Update the emacs load path
(push (concat (getenv "OCAML_TOPLEVEL_PATH")
          "/../../share/emacs/site-lisp") load-path)
;; Automatically load utop.el
(autoload 'utop "utop" "Toplevel for OCaml" t)
(autoload 'utop-setup-ocaml-buffer "utop" "Toplevel for OCaml" t)
(add-hook 'tuareg-mode-hook 'utop-setup-ocaml-buffer)

Once this successfully loads in Emacs, you can run utop by doing M-x utop in Emacs. You can also use commands like Ctrl-c Ctrl-b to evaluate your current buffer in utop, orCtrl-c Ctrl-e to just evaluate a single expression.

There are more detailed instructions at the utop homepage.

Using Emacs24 packages

As an alternative to the setup above, here is a simplified OCaml setup using MELPApackages.

Add to .emacs.d/init.el

(require 'package)
(add-to-list 'package-archives
             '("melpa" . "http://melpa.milkbox.net/packages/") t)

Now do M-x package-install and install tuareg, utop and merlin.

Then add the rest of the configuration to .emacs.d/init.el

(add-hook 'tuareg-mode-hook 'tuareg-imenu-set-imenu)
(setq auto-mode-alist
      (append '(("\\.ml[ily]?$" . tuareg-mode)
                ("\\.topml$" . tuareg-mode))
              auto-mode-alist)) 
(autoload 'utop-setup-ocaml-buffer "utop" "Toplevel for OCaml" t)
(add-hook 'tuareg-mode-hook 'utop-setup-ocaml-buffer)
(add-hook 'tuareg-mode-hook 'merlin-mode)
(setq merlin-use-auto-complete-mode t)
(setq merlin-error-after-save nil)

Vim

Vim users can use the built-in style, and ocaml-annot may also be useful. For a more richly-featured setup, see the section on Merlin below.

Eclipse

Eclipse is a popular IDE usually used for Java development. The OCaml Development Tools (ODT) project provides equivalent IDE features for editing and compiling OCaml code, such as automatic compilation and name completion. Installation instructions can be found here

Other editors

There are lots of other editors, and many of them come with built-in OCaml modes. These includes TextMate and Sublime Text for the Mac, and countless others.

Cross-editor tools

There are a number of tools that are compatible with multiple editors that can help you work more effectively with OCaml. Two of the best are merlin and ocp-indent, which we'll describe below. Note that these are very much optional. You might want to get started with the book before getting back to setting these up.

Merlin

Merlin provides a number of advanced IDE-like features, including:

• context-sensitive auto-completion
• interactive type-querying (i.e., you can ask it, "what is the type of this expression")
• error reporting -- it will highlight parts of your code that don't compile as you go.

You can install merlin with OPAM:

$ opam install merlin

Then you will need to add configuration for your editor. The following examples assume Merlin has been installed through OPAM as above.

Emacs

A summary follows -- for more complete information, see Merlin's Emacs documentation.

;; -- merlin setup ---------------------------------------

(setq opam-share (substring (shell-command-to-string "opam config var share") 0 -1))
(add-to-list 'load-path (concat opam-share "/emacs/site-lisp"))
(require 'merlin)

;; Enable Merlin for ML buffers
(add-hook 'tuareg-mode-hook 'merlin-mode)

;; So you can do it on a mac, where `C-` and `C-` are used
;; by spaces.
(define-key merlin-mode-map
  (kbd "C-c ") 'merlin-type-enclosing-go-up)
(define-key merlin-mode-map
  (kbd "C-c ") 'merlin-type-enclosing-go-down)
(set-face-background 'merlin-type-face "#88FF44")

;; -- enable auto-complete -------------------------------
;; Not required, but useful along with merlin-mode
(require 'auto-complete)
(add-hook 'tuareg-mode-hook 'auto-complete-mode)

Here are some of the more useful key commands that merlin provides:

• C-c C-t: merlin-type-enclosing: show you the type of the current expression. C- and C- can then be used to look at the types of enclosing expressions, or drill down to smaller ones.
• C-c : if you have auto-complete set up, this gives you a list of possible auto-completions, along with their types. You can use C-s to search within that list.
• C-c C-l: to go to the definition of the value under your cursor.
• C-c r: to restart merlin if it gets confused

Vim

A summary follows -- for more complete information, see Merlin's Vim documentation and :h merlin.txt after installing.

" Your vimrc
filetype plugin indent on
syntax enable

" Vim needs to be built with Python scripting support, and must be
" able to find Merlin's executable on PATH.
if executable('ocamlmerlin') && has('python')
  let s:ocamlmerlin = substitute(system('opam config var share'), '\n$', '', '''') . "/ocamlmerlin"
  execute "set rtp+=".s:ocamlmerlin."/vim"
  execute "set rtp+=".s:ocamlmerlin."/vimbufsync"
endif

As a one-time step after installation, index the documentation in Vim's help system:

:execute "helptags " . substitute(system('opam config var share'), '\n$', '', '''') . "/ocamlmerlin/vim/doc"

Some highlights of the functionality this enables:

• Autocompletion with Vim's omnicomplete system: 
• Quick type checking with keybindings -- the defaults use LocalLeader, which is normally backslash (\) by default:
  • \t: type of expression under the cursor (also works with a visual selection).
  • \n / \p: expand/contract the expression(s) to type check.
• :Locate [identifier]: go to the definition of given identifier or the one under the cursor.
• :Reload: if Merlin gets confused following build changes like new packages.
• :GotoDotMerlin: edit the .merlin project configuration (see below).

The plugin can integrate with some other popular Vim plugins such as Syntastic and neocomplcache -- see :help merlin.txt for pointers.

Tell Merlin about your project layout

Regardless of which editor you use, you need to tell Merlin a bit about the build environment you're working with in order for it to work properly. This is done by creating a .merlin file. If you're building applications based on Core and Async using the corebuild script (which is built on top of ocamlbuild), then the following is a good starting point.

S .
B _build
PKG core
PKG async
PKG core_extended
EXT nonrec

See the Merlin README for complete details of the file format.

ocp-indent

ocp-indent is a source-code indenter which includes a command-line tool, library and integration with emacs and vi. It does a better job than most editor modes, including tuareg, and has the advantage that it can be used as a command-line tool and be integrated into multiple editors, so you get consistent indentation across tools.

You can install it with opam:

$ opam install ocp-indent

Emacs

After installing through OPAM, simply load the file as follows to override tuareg-mode's indentation:

(setq opam-share (substring (shell-command-to-string "opam config var share") 0 -1))
(load-file (concat opam-share "/typerex/ocp-indent/ocp-indent.el"))

Vim

After installing through OPAM, simply add this autocmd to your Vim configuration:

" Your vimrc
autocmd FileType ocaml source substitute(system('opam config var share'), '\n$', '', '''') . "/typerex/ocp-indent/ocp-indent.vim"

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