Step 1: Install System Requirements

Your system will need to meet a few prerequisites before installing ReWire:

Haskell Platform, version 7.10.3. Later versions of GHC (8.0 or greater) will not work with ReWire because these later releases do not yet fully support libraries ReWire relies on.
Some sort of FPGA development tool suite that supports VHDL. Currently the only tested tools are those from Xilinx:
- ISE
- Vivado
Each of these tools is available in a free “WebPACK” version.
(Optional) An FPGA development board. (If you do not have access to a development board, you may still be able to test out your designs in simulation.)

For the quick start tutorial we will be using ISE and the (sadly discontinued) Spartan-3E Starter Kit.

Step 2: Acquire ReWire Source

You can download the latest ReWire source code from the release page on GitHub.

Note that depending on your system configuration, the cabal install steps below may require administrative privileges.

$ tar xvzf ReWire-<version>.tar.gz
$ cd ReWire-<version>
$ cabal install --only-dependencies
$ cabal configure
$ cabal install

If everything works correctly, you should now have an rwc binary somewhere in your path.

$ which rwc
/Users/me/Library/Haskell/bin/rwc