OCaml on Nitrous.IO

Nitrous.IO provides free servers with console access to developers. The servers can be provisioned across different geographies and allows for a good way to code on the web. Each nitrous box comes with a web based IDE and console access. They provide boxes for web development in Ruby/Rails, Go, Python/Django and node.js. However since they allow console access it is possible to install many other systems on your nitrous box. It can be used as a good way to do we based tutorials or small projects inside the box as well. The web based IDE also has experimental support for collaboration so it can be a good tool to work on some project together with others. In this post I will show how to install OCaml on Nitrous so that you can code and test simple OCaml programs. It can be ideal for class assignments or small projects since the OCaml compiler is not the easiest thing to install on Windows and Mac platforms (based on my experience of teaching a class of undergrads). 

To begin, register on nitrous.io and create a new box, you can choose any of the default box but I chose python. Give it some name (dev-box) and chose the region closest to you (Southeast Asia).

Once you create a box you should be logged into the web based IDE on the box with console at bottom as shown below.

We will use the console to download and install the OCaml compiler. You can use the source code from the OCaml github repository. Just clone the source code using the https url to the repository. ("git clone https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml.git") 

It will create an ocaml directory with all the source code in your workspace. Change to that directory and then run "./configure -prefix /home/action/.local" This will tell the compiler to install in your local user directory under .local folder. 

Once the configuration finishes successfully, we can use "make world.opt" to build the compiler and "make install" to install it. (Look up INSTALL file in the ocaml directory for more detailed notes on installation. It is pretty standard way of  building the compiler on a linux machine.)  If you followed the steps without errors you will now have a working OCaml compiler on your nitrous box. You can run the OCaml toplevel by running "ocaml" from your workspace. Additional OCaml libraries like findlib can also be installed by using wget command to get the source code from their website and building them. 

You can use the web based IDE provided with your nitrous box to edit OCaml programs and run them using the console.

As you can see above I am using C for syntax highlighting as the web IDE doesn't support OCaml yet. The setup is not perfect but it allows anyone to try OCaml on the web without much fuss and hey its free !!! I actually managed to run all the lab assignments and tutorials for the module I am TAing this semester at NUS.