As a haskell package, git-annex can be installed using cabal.
Start by installing the Haskell Platform. In Debian, this is as simple as:
sudo apt-get install haskell-platform
minimal build
This builds git-annex without some features that require C libraries, that can be harder to get installed. This is plenty to get started using it, although it does not include the assistant or webapp.
cabal update
PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH
cabal install git-annex --bindir=$HOME/bin -f"-assistant -webapp -webdav -pairing -xmpp -dns"
full build
To build with all features enabled, including the assistant and webapp, you will need to install several C libraries and their headers, including libgnutls, libgsasl, libxml2, and zlib. Then run:
cabal update
PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH
cabal install c2hs --bindir=$HOME/bin
cabal install git-annex --bindir=$HOME/bin
building from git checkout
But maybe you want something newer (or older). Then download the version you want, and use cabal as follows inside its source tree:
cabal update
PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH
cabal install c2hs --bindir=$HOME/bin
cabal install --only-dependencies
cabal configure
cabal build
cabal install --bindir=$HOME/bin
After finishing the installation the cabal way, here are the packages I installed. It is possible that there are other packages I installed previously as dependency for other packages.
I get an error from the command as above: $ sudo apt-get install cabal-install libgnutls28-dev libgsasl7-dev c2hs libghc libxml-sax-dev zlib1g-dev libghc-zlib-dev
$ lsb_release -a No LSB modules are available. Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS Release: 12.04 Codename: precise
If you're installing git-annex with cabal, there is no need to install any haskell library packages with apt-get. That includes libghc-libxml-sax-dev and libghc-zlib-dev. Without those, the apt-get line may work to install the C libraries needed for cabal to install the haskell libraries.
However, see the the Ubuntu page for much easier ways to get git-annex installed.
@Joey Many thanks. I am new to Haskell (vaguely looked at it with DARCS) and git-annex. After installing with apt-get on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS I found webapp was missing, hence have come here. I am going through the correct steps now, it should be awesome when done.
This seems to be a long build process (still going on my old laptop, much longer than apt-get). Ubuntu git-annex packages from 13.10 Saucy I think are updated to include webapp.
I'm having problems installing from cabal, and it seems related to yesod. I found an older discussion on something similar, where a constraint to require a newer version of yesod had been added, but I haven't figured out what was done to solve it.
The problem seems to be that git-annex requires yesod < 1.2, but cabal is unable to install an older version.
From what I can tell, the problem is fixed in github master since yesod >= 1.2 is supported again.
I had - maybe the same problem as Nigel - with ExitFailure 1 libxml-sax-0.7.4 .
I could fix this by forcing the link of libxml2 package with "brew link libxml2 --force". Maybe you should update your guide. I had this problem on 2 different machines running both the current versions of OS X.
After this the build finished successfull. Maybe this helps.