Lake

Lake (Lean Make) is a new build system and package manager for Lean 4. With Lake, package configuration is written in Lean inside a dedicated lakefile.lean stored in the root of the package directory. Each lakefile.lean includes a package declaration (akin to main) which defines the package's configuration.

Building and Running Lake

As Lake functions as an alternative to leanpkg, it is not built with it. Instead, there is a pre-packaged build.sh shell script which is used to build Lake. It passes it arguments down to a make command. So, if you have more than one core, you will probably want to use a -jX option to specify how many build tasks you want it to run in parallel. For example:

$ ./build.sh -j4

After building, the lake binary will be located at build/bin/lake and the library's .olean files will be located directly in build.

Building with Nix Flakes

It is also possible to build Lake with the Nix setup buildLeanPackage from the leanprover/lean4 repository. To do so, you need to have Nix installed with flakes enabled. It is recommended to also set up the Lean 4 binary cache as described in the Lean 4 repository.

It is then possible to build Lake with nix build . or run it from anywhere with nix run github:leanprover/lake.

A development environment with Lean 4 installed can be loaded automatically by running nix develop or automatically on cd with direnv by running direnv allow.

The versions of nixpkgs and lean4 are fixed to specific hashes. They can be updated by running nix flake update.

Thank Anders Christiansen Sørby (@Anderssorby) for this support!

Augmenting Lake's Search Path

The lake executable needs to know where to find the .olean files for the modules used in the package configuration file. Lake will intelligently setup an initial search path based on the location of its own executable and lean.

Specifically, if Lake is co-located with lean (i.e., there is lean executable in the same directory as itself), it will assume it was installed with Lean and that both Lean and Lake are located in <lean-home>/bin with Lean's .olean files at <lean-home/lib/lean and Lake's at .olean files at <lean-home/lib/lake. Otherwise, it will run lean --print-prefix to find Lean's home and assume that its .olean files are at <lean-home>/lib/lean and that lake is at <lake-home>/bin/lake with its .olean files at <lake-home>.

This search path can be augmented by including other directories of .olean files in the LEAN_PATH environment variable. Such directories will take precedence over the initial search path, so LEAN_PATH can also be used to correct Lake's search if the .olean files for Lean (or Lake itself) are in non-standard locations.

Creating and Building a Package

We can set up a new package by running lake init <package-name> in a fresh directory. For example, we can create the package hello like so:

$ mkdir hello
$ cd hello
$ lake init hello

This will initialize a git repository in the directory with a basic .gitignore that ignores the build directory (i.e., build) where Lake outputs build files.

It will also create the root Lean file for the package's library, which uses the capitalized version of the package's name (e.g., Hello.lean in this example), and the root file for the package's binary Main.lean. They contain the following dummy "Hello World" program split across the two files:

Hello.lean

def hello := "world"

Main.lean

def main : IO Unit :=
  IO.println s!"Hello, {hello}!"

Lake also creates a basic lakefile.lean for the package:

import Lake
open Lake DSL

package {
  name := "hello"
}

along with a lean-toolchain file that contains the version string of the currently active Lean, which tells elan to use that Lean toolchain for the package.

The command lake build-bin can then be used to build the package (and its dependencies, if it has them) into a native executable. The result will be placed in build/bin.

$ lake build-bin
...
$ ./build/bin/hello
Hello, world!

Configuration Options

Lake provides a large assortment of configuration options for packages.

General

• name (Required): The name of the package.
• scripts: A HashMap of scripts for the package. A Script is an arbitrary (args : List String) → IO UInt32 function that is indexed by a String key and can be be run by lake run <key> [-- <args>].
• dependencies: An Array of the package's dependencies.
• depsDir: The directory to which Lake should download dependencies. Defaults to lean_packages.
• extraDepTarget: An extra OpaqueTarget that should be built before the package.
• srcDir: The directory containing the package's Lean source files. Defaults to the package's directory. (This will be passed to lean as the -R option.)
• buildDir: The directory to which Lake should output the package's build results. Defaults to build.
• oleanDir: The build subdirectory to which Lake should output the package's .olean files. Defaults to lib.
• libRoots: The root module(s) of the package. Imports relative to this root (e.g., Pkg.Foo) are considered part of the package. Defaults to a single root of the package's uppercase name.
• libGlobs: An Array of module Globs to build for the package's library. Defaults to a Glob.one of each of the module's libRoots. Submodule globs build every source file within their directory. Local imports of glob'ed files (i.e., fellow modules of the package) are also recursively built.
• leanArgs: An Array of additional arguments to pass to lean while compiling Lean source files.

Library / Binary Compilation

• leancArgs: An Array additional arguments to pass to leanc while compiling the C source files generated by lean. Defaults to -O3 and -DNDEBUG.
• irDir: The build subdirectory to which Lake should output the package's intermediary results (e.g., .c and .o files). Defaults to ir.
• libName: The name of the package's static library. Defaults to the string representation of the package's moduleRoot.
• libDir: The build subdirectory to which Lake should output the package's static library. Defaults to lib.
• binName: The name of the package's binary executable. Defaults to the package's name.
• binDir: The build subdirectory to which Lake should output the package's binary executable. Defaults to bin.
• binRoot: The root module of the package's binary executable. Defaults to Main. The root is built by recursively building its local imports (i.e., fellow modules of the package). This setting is most useful for packages that are distributing both a library and a binary (like Lake itself). In such cases, it is common for there to be code (e.g., main) that is needed for the binary but should not be included in the library proper.
• moreLibTargets: Additional library FileTargets (beyond the package's and its dependencies' libraries) to build and link to the package's binary executable (and/or to dependent package's executables).
• linkArgs: Additional arguments to pass to leanc while compiling the package's binary executable. These will come after the paths of libraries built with moreLibTargets.