Nightly and development installations
The previous guides about Linux/Mac/WSL and Windows installations assumed that you wanted to install the latest community release of Catala hosted on the main public opam repository. Through a different usage of the opam client, this page presents how to get nightly versions and development versions of Catala (provided by the Catala team).
The Catala team recommends that your first install the latest community releases using the regular installation guides before trying the alternative installation methods presented on this page. These alternative installation methods receive less care and attention than the mainstream instal path from the Catala team.
Nightly versions of Catala
The Catala team maintains a special release distribution channel to provide regularly nightly versions of Catala cureated from the main development branches. These nightly versions contain fixes and improvements from the last community release, but should be used at your own risk since they are not as well tested as the community releases.
To access these nightly versions, you need to create a new switch in your local
opam pointing to a special opam
repository
maintained by the Catala team. This switch will be used to install the special
catala-full package maintained in this special opam repository by the Catala
team. The catala-full package installs in a single command the whole Catala suite with
catala, catala-lsp and catala-format, taking the nightly version of the
packages as defined by the Catala team.
All of this can be done thanks to this magical opam command:
$ opam switch create --repos catala-nightly="git+https://gitlab.inria.fr/catala/opam-repository#nightly" catala-full
You now have a new switch named catala-full that contains the nightly version
of Catala. You can do opam switch to see which switches are installed
and use opam switch <name of the switch> to change which switch you are
using and go back and forth from the community release of Catala to the
nightly version of Catala.
If you want to make sure that you’re always using
the nightly version of Catala when you invoke opam from a certain repository,
you can invoke opam switch link catala-full from that repository.
After switching your version of Catala, don’t forget to call clerk clean
in your repository and restart your IDE.
With this setup, getting the latest nightly version from the Catala team is as simple as :
$ opam update catala-nightly -u -y
Development versions of Catala
If you feel adventurous, you can retrieve the latest development version of
the Catala tooling, pulling directly from the master branches of the
repositories of the Catala development team. To do so,
you need to pin the catala,
catala-lsp and catala-format opam packages in your switch to a dev
version pointing to the git repositories of the Catala tooling. Here is the
command to invoke:
$ opam pin catala.dev --dev-repo
$ opam pin catala-lsp.dev --dev-repo
$ opam pin catala-format.dev --dev-repo
If you’re tired of the bleeding edge and want to go back to the normal releases, simply unpin the development versions:
$ opam unpin catala.dev
$ opam unpin catala-lsp.dev
$ opam unpin catala-format.dev
And reinstall Catala:
$ opam reinstall catala
$ opam reinstall catala-lsp
$ opam reinstall catala-format