Fixing the missing `ar` error with a development build of GHC (on NixOS)

Posted on June 21, 2018

On NixOS, if you build GHC from source using Make or hadrian and try to use it with cabal then you will be greeted with the following error:

cabal: The program 'ar' is required but it could not be found.

The way to fix this problem is to run cabal in an environment with the binutils-unwrapped package available. You can then use cabal as normal.

nix-shell -p binutils-unwrapped