I'm leaving this here in case you want to add it to the docs. It's an important use case for me as being able to run mobile is a deciding factor in my choice of software. Maybe it will help others too.



I've managed to build hledger 1.25 in termux on a Google Pixel 6 using a minimal ubuntu instalI in proot. I was unable to get a working toolset in termux alone. Here are the steps taken.

1. Install Termux app https://termux.com/

2. In termux install proot-distro (https://github.com/termux/proot-distro)

apt install proot-distro 

3. Install Ubuntu 22.04 minimal in termux

proot-distro install ubuntu

4. Login to Ubuntu proot

proot-distro login ubuntu

5. Install needed dependencies

apt install apt-utils libghc-base-prelude-dev zlib1g-dev

6. Build using cabal 
cabal update
cabal install alex happy
cabal install hledger-1.25 hledger-ui-1.25 hledger-web-1.25

Caveats:

I couldn't get stack to upgrade. Binary upgrades are not supported on aarch64 and it throws a 404 error when trying to build from source. The version of cabal that ships with Ubuntu 22.04 (3.6.2.0) works fine though.

You have to run the binaries from within a Linux proot environment as Termux isn't able to run binaries compiled for Linux. This isn't an issue as it's a single command and the filesystem is in an easily accessible folder. I might look into setting up a build environment to package hledger for termux repositories at some point.

On my pixel 6 pro I was using 8-9gb ram throughout the build process. I'm not sure how this would go on older hardware. The builds were actually much faster than on my laptop using stack. Also as of Android 12 processes are killed automatically when using too many resources and backgrounded so need to not do much else and possibly keep screen awake regularly while building.

sm