Prerequisites: an install of Docker (If you don’t want an install, Digital Ocean also has a Docker Droplet).

The Docker-Haskell “Official Images” container is available for download. You can find the source over on GitHub and the versions currently being built in the official-images repo.

To start a ghci we can pull and run the image tagged as 7.8, which contains alex, happy, cabal and ghc-7.8.3:

docker pull haskell:7.8
docker run -it haskell:7.8

quitting the repl (:q) will also kill the container.

Building a Dockerfile

We can base a new project’s Dockerfile off of the haskell:7.8 base. As it happens, there is an example Snap project in the docker-haskell project, in the /examples/7.8.3/ directory.

If we clone the repo and cd into the example project’s folder we can build the Dockerfile:

git clone git@github.com:darinmorrison/docker-haskell.git
cd docker-haskell/examples/7.8.3/snap
docker build -t my-new-project .

and run it:

docker run -itp 8000:8000 my-new-project

We can now see a Snap application running on port 8000 of either localhost or our boot2docker ip.