Deploying Haskell web application to low-spec server

Question

I'm looking for a way to deploy a Haskell web application on a low-spec toy server. The server specs:

• OS: debian stable (squeeze) i386
• CPU: 1 GHz Pentium IV
• RAM: 512 MB
• Storage: 512 MB compact flash (mounted on /var), 4 GB USB compact flash (mounted on /)

The server runs fine, it doesn't see much traffic (it's mainly used by myself, friends and family members), and I can afford to run it from my living room because it's completely silent and draw very little power (around 10 W idle, 40 W peak).

Quite obviously, I would like to avoid installing the entire Haskell platform and compile on the server - I'd run out of disk space fairly quickly, and compilation is bound to take ages due to slow storage. I can't just deploy binaries from my development machine though, because that one runs debian testing amd64, so the binaries won't be compatible. My ideas so far:

• install a VM with debian/i386 to build on
• figure out a way to build i386 binaries on amd64
• compile to C on the development machine, copy C sources to server, finish build there (installing gcc or clang on the server is probably acceptable)
• other ideas?

Which one sounds the most promising? Are option 2 and 3 even possible?

Also, I'm a bit concerned about libraries; the application depends on a few system libraries such as libcairo; installing them on the server is not a problem, but I wonder whether, especially for option 2, this would work (library versions etc.)

Answer 1

Not tried with haskell, but with similar requirements in the past I've found it simplest to just set up a vm with the same version of debian as the target system. Means you don't need to worry about library versioning etc.