With ghcup adding support for nightly GHC builds, it's now possible to test your project with nightly GHC releases. This allows for detecting stability issues before a stable release happens.
This is an example GitHub action of how to use nightly GHC builds with ghcup. It's set up as a cron job, which builds against the latest GHC-nightly release.
If a nightly build fails, an issue is automatically created with a link to the failed job.
Note that I set it to once a week; otherwise, it'll burn through one's GitHub action allowance fast.
Copy over the file in .github/workflows/nightly.yaml
into your project.
GHC prereleases often require patched versions of various package.
The GHC team maintains a collections of patched packages for
testing purposes, called head.hackage.
When testing your code with a nightly version of GHC, you may need
to follow the instructions on the head.hackage page to enable it.
The patches in head.hackage have not necessarily been reviewed
or accepted by the package maintainers - it should only be used for
testing prelease compilers, and please don't report patch-related bugs
to the package maintainers.