Getting started developing: In order for the conf file code to work correctly in a development setting, what you should do is: $ runhaskell Setup.hs configure --prefix=foo Where foo is some scratch development installation dir, doesn't really matter where. You must then runhaskell Setup.hs install to copy files there. After which, running will be able to locate default conf which will then allow it to bootstrap the "real" configuration. Running the daemon in a development setting: Start this daemon with the helper script in bin/uacpid-dev This will use a custom HOME environment that points to dev/home/ And will keep it from looking at your real $HOME/.uacpid/ Start in developement like this: $ bin/uacpid-dev & Stop in developement like this, use the full path so only the development execution is killed. Or get the pid and use kill: $ killall dist/build/uacpid/uacpid