How to locally generate a preview of the web page for my cabal package?

Question

From the Hackage check/upload page:

Checking a Cabal package

Re-uploading a package with the same version number is not permitted, so you might want to do some checking before uploading:

• You could check that your source bundle builds, including the haddock documentation if it's a library.
• The following form checks that a package is uploadable, warns about sundry other matters, and presents a preview of the web page for the package. It does not add the package to the database.

(my emphasis)

How do I generate a preview of the web page for the package locally? i.e. without using that website form?

(The "web page for the package" is e.g. this is QuickCheck's.)

Answer 1

You use cabal haddock to generate this page. This will generate the documentation in dist/doc/html/<library-or-executable-name>/index.html.

Additionally, you can edit your ~/.cabal/config file to include the line:

documentation: True

This will automatically install documentation for all of the packages you install with Cabal, and you will get a list of all installed modules on the system in the ~/.cabal/share/doc/index.html file; this is useful for ghci sessions or when you want to find out which package contains which modules, etc.