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.

Getting Lake

Lake is part of the lean4 repository and is distributed along with its official releases (e.g., as part of the elan toolchain). So if you have installed a semi-recent Lean 4 nightly, you should already have it!

Note that the Lake included with Lean is not updated as frequently as this repository, so some bleeding edge features may be missing. If you want to build the latest version from the source yourself, check out the build instructions at the bottom of this README.

Creating and Building a Package

To create a new package, either run lake init <package-name> to setup the package in the current directory or lake new <package-name> to create it in a new directory. For example, we could create the package hello like so:

$ mkdir hello
$ cd hello
$ lake init hello

or like so:

$ lake new hello
$ cd hello

Either way, Lake will initialize a git repository in the package 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 hello {
  -- add configuration options here
}

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

Adding Dependencies

Lake packages can also have dependencies. Dependencies are other Lake packages the current package needs in order to function. To define a dependency, add an entry to the dependencies field of the package configuration. Each entry includes the name of the package and where to find it. Dependencies can be sourced directly from a local folder (e.g., a subdirectory of the package) or come from remote Git repositories. When sourcing from a Git repository, specify the revision of the package to clone, which can be a commit hash, branch, or tag.

For example, one can depend on the Lean 4 port of mathlib like so:

package hello {
  dependencies := #[{
    name := `mathlib
    src := Source.git "https://github.com/leanprover-community/mathlib4.git" "master"
  }]
}

The next run of lake build (or refreshing dependencies in an editor like VSCode) will clone the mathlib repository and build it.

Further examples of different package configurations can be found in the examples folder of this repository.

Package Configuration Options

Lake provides a large assortment of configuration options for packages.

Workspace

Workspace options are shared across a package and its dependencies.

• packagesDir: The directory to which Lake should download remote dependencies. Defaults to lean_packages.

General

• dependencies: An Array of the package's dependencies.
• extraDepTarget: An extra OpaqueTarget that should be built before the package. Target.collectOpaqueList/collectOpaqueArray can be used combine multiple extra targets into a single extraDepTarget.
• defaultFacet: The PackageFacet to build on a bare lake build of the package. Can be one of bin, staticLib, sharedLib, or oleans. Defaults to bin. See lake help build for more info on build facets.
• moreServerArgs: Additional arguments to pass to the Lean language server (i.e., lean --server) launched by lake server.
• 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.
• moreLeanArgs: An Array of additional arguments to pass to lean while compiling Lean source files.

Library / Binary Compilation

• moreLeancArgs: An Array of additional arguments to pass to leanc while compiling the C source files generated by lean. Lake already passes -O3 and -DNDEBUG automatically, but you can change this by, for example, adding -O0 and -UNDEBUG.
• 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 package's upper camel case name.
• 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 with any . replaced with a -.
• 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: An Array of 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).
• supportInterpreter: Whether to expose symbols within the executable to the Lean interpreter. This allows the executable to interpret Lean files (e.g., via Lean.Elab.runFrontend). Implementation-wise, this passes -rdynamic to the linker when building on a non-Windows systems. Defaults to false.
• moreLinkArgs: An Array of additional arguments to pass to leanc while compiling the package's binary executable. These will come after the paths of libraries built with moreLibTargets.

Scripts

A configuration file can also contain a number of scripts declaration. A script is an arbitrary (args : List String) → IO UInt32 definition that can be run by lake run <script> [-- <args>]. For example, given the following lakefile.lean:

import Lake
open Lake DSL

package scripts

/--
Display a greeting

USAGE:
  lake run greet [-h] [-- [name]]

Greet the entity with the given name. Otherwise, greet the whole world.
-/
script greet (args) do
  if h : 0 < args.length then
    IO.println s!"Hello, {args.get 0 h}!"
  else
    IO.println "Hello, world!"
  return 0

The script greet can be run like so:

$ lake run greet
Hello, world!
$ lake run greet -- me
Hello, me!

You can print the docstring of a script by passing -h/--help after its name:

$ lake run greet --help
Display a greeting

USAGE:
  lake run greet [-h] [-- name]

Greet the entity with the given name. Otherwise, greet the whole world.

Building and Running Lake from the Source

If you already have a Lean installation with lake packaged with it, you can build a new lake by just running lake build.

Otherwise, there is a pre-packaged build.sh shell script that can be 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 in build/lib.

Building with Nix Flakes

It is also possible to build Lake with the Nix setup buildLeanPackage from the 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 .olean files at <lean-home/lib/lean. 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>/lib.

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.