Chapter 3. Basics

The first step with any new technology is getting it to run. The goal of this chapter is to get you started with a simple Yesod application, and cover some of the basic concepts and terminology.

Hello World

Let’s get this book started properly: a simple web page that says Hello World:

{-# LANGUAGE TypeFamilies, QuasiQuotes, MultiParamTypeClasses,
             TemplateHaskell, OverloadedStrings #-}
import Yesod

data HelloWorld = HelloWorld

mkYesod "HelloWorld" [parseRoutes|
/ HomeR GET
|]

instance Yesod HelloWorld

getHomeR :: Handler RepHtml
getHomeR = defaultLayout [whamlet|Hello World!|]

main :: IO ()
main = warpDebug 3000 HelloWorld

If you save that code in helloworld.hs and run it with runhaskell helloworld.hs, you’ll get a web server running on port 3000. If you point your browser to http://localhost:3000, you’ll get the following HTML:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html><head><title></title></head><body>Hello World!</body></html>

We’ll refer back to this example through the rest of the chapter.

Routing

Like most modern web frameworks, Yesod follows a front controller pattern. This means that every request to a Yesod application enters at the same point and is routed from there. As a contrast, in systems like PHP and ASP you usually create a number of different files, and the web server automatically directs requests to the relevant file.

In addition, Yesod uses a declarative style for specifying routes. In our example above, this looked like:

mkYesod "HelloWorld" [parseRoutes|
/ HomeR GET

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