IHP seems great, but I found it very hard to work with.

The guide said it takes 15 minutes to build initially...it took my laptop 1 1/2 hours. And I didn't use cachix (no idea what it was, didn't want it to mess with my system) so after a nix-gc I had to build again...

And the pro version costs $300/year, and goes up to $1500/year if you make $20k. That might be good for a huge company, but if that's a side project or a solo dev's income, that's way too expensive.

Let alone that it appears on any forum that ever mentions haskell these days.

Cachix manages the prebuilt binaries used by IHP. If you don't install Cachix, nix will compile a lot of IHP's dependencies from scratch. This takes a long while and is not recommended.

It manages the prebuilt binaries...but requires being run as root or adding myself to the list of Nix trustedUsers...on an OS level.

Both of those things are scary and dangerous. I don't know what your software or Cachix is doing.

Can you tell me exactly what it will be doing to my system? What changes? Does it use a lot of disk space? Is it easy to undo? And is there anyone who recommends doing it who isn't associated to IHP?

If you're not a fan of the ruby-on-rails / swiss army knife approach that IHP takes, check out Scotty. Add Lucid for Html rendering, and Selda for Postgres. (There are other options for any of these tools if you prefer)

  - Scotty (simple web routing) https://hackage.haskell.org/package/scotty
  - Lucid (html rendering) https://hackage.haskell.org/package/lucid
  - Selda (postgres) https://selda.link/

hmm, last time I used Scotty, I thought it was the exact opposite of Rails and more like Sinatra. It's less batteries included and more flexible and lightweight. Yesod is more like RoR, no? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by swiss army knife?

you missed the "not a fan" part

Oh gawd. I totally did, my bad! Time for more coffee. Thanks

Did selda get the hug of death?