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Tutorial
For those of you new to the JVM who have never touched Ant or Maven in anger: don't panic. Leiningen is designed with you in mind. This tutorial will help you get started and explain Leiningen's take on project automation and JVM-land dependency management.
Also keep in mind that Leiningen ships with fairly comprehensive help;
lein help gives a list of tasks while lein help task provides
details. Further documentation such as the readme, sample
configuration, and even this tutorial are also provided.
Creating a Project
We'll assume you've got Leiningen installed as per the README. Generating a new project is easy:
$ lein new my-stuff
Generating a project called my-stuff based on the 'default' template.
$ cd my-stuff
$ tree
.
|-- project.clj
|-- README.md
|-- src
| `-- my_stuff
| `-- core.clj
`-- test
`-- my_stuff
`-- core_test.clj
Here we've got your project's README, a src/ directory containing the
code, a test/ directory, and a project.clj file which describes your
project to Leiningen. The src/my_stuff/core.clj file corresponds to
the my-stuff.core namespace.
Note that we use my-stuff.core instead of just my-stuff since
single-segment namespaces are discouraged in Clojure. Also note that
namespaces with dashes in the name will have the corresponding file
named with underscores instead since the JVM has trouble loading files
with dashes in the name. The intricacies of namespaces are a common
source of confusion for newcomers, and while they are mostly outside
the scope of this tutorial, you can
read up on them elsewhere.
project.clj
$ cat project.clj
(defproject my-stuff "0.1.0-SNAPSHOT"
:description "FIXME: write description"
:url "http://example.com/FIXME"
:license {:name "Eclipse Public License"
:url "http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html"}
:dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.3.0"]])
If you don't fill in the :description with a short sentence, your
project will be harder to find in search results, so start there. Be
sure to fix the :url as well. At some point you'll need to flesh out
the README too, but for now let's skip ahead to setting
:dependencies. Note that Clojure is just another dependency here.
Unlike most languages, it's easy to swap out any version of Clojure.
Dependencies
By default, Leiningen projects download dependencies from Clojars and Central. Clojars is the Clojure community's centralized jar repository, while Central is for the wider JVM community.
Libraries for the JVM are packaged up as .jar files, which are basically just .zip files with a little extra JVM-specific metadata. They usually contain .class files (JVM bytecode) and .clj source files, but they can also contain other things like config files.
You can search Clojars using its
web interface. On the page for clj-http it shows this:
[clj-http "0.4.1"]
There are two different ways of specifying a dependency on the latest
stable version of the clj-http library, one in Leiningen format
shown above and one in Maven format. We'll skip the Maven one for now,
though you'll need to learn to read it for Java libraries from
Central. You can copy the Leiningen version
directly into the :dependencies vector in project.clj.
Within the vector, "clj-http" is referred to as the "artifact id". "0.4.1" is the version. Some libraries will also have "group ids", which are displayed like this:
[com.cedarsoft.utils.legacy/hibernate "1.3.4"]
The group-id is the part before the slash. Especially for Java
libraries, it's often a reversed domain name. Clojure libraries often
use the same group-id and artifact-id (as with clj-http), in which case
you can omit the group-id. If there is a library that's part of a
larger group (such as ring-jetty-adapter being part of the ring
project), the group-id is often the same across all the sub-projects.
Sometimes versions will end in "-SNAPSHOT". This means that it is not an official release but a development build. Relying on snapshot dependencies is discouraged but is sometimes necessary if you need bug fixes, etc. that have not made their way into a release yet. However, snapshot versions are not guaranteed to stick around, so it's important that non-development releases never depend upon snapshot versions that you don't control. Adding a snapshot dependency to your project will cause Leiningen to actively go seek out the latest version of the dependency daily (whereas normal release versions are cached in the local repository) so if you have a lot of snapshots it will slow things down.
Note that some libraries make their group-id and artifact-id
correspond with the namespace they provide inside the jar, but this is
just a convention. There is no guarantee they will match up at all, so
consult the library's documentation before writing your :require
and :import clauses.
You can add third-party repositories by setting the :repositories key
in project.clj. See the
sample.project.clj.
Running Code
Enough setup; let's see some code running. Start with a REPL (read-eval-print loop):
$ lein repl
nREPL server started on port 40612
Welcome to REPL-y!
Clojure 1.4.0
Exit: Control+D or (exit) or (quit)
Commands: (user/help)
Docs: (doc function-name-here)
(find-doc "part-of-name-here")
Source: (source function-name-here)
(user/sourcery function-name-here)
Javadoc: (javadoc java-object-or-class-here)
Examples from clojuredocs.org: [clojuredocs or cdoc]
(user/clojuredocs name-here)
(user/clojuredocs "ns-here" "name-here")
user=>
The REPL is an interactive prompt where you can enter arbitrary code
to run in the context of your project. Since we've added clj-http to
:dependencies, we are able to load it here along with code from the
my-stuff.core namespace in your project's own src/ directory:
user=> (require 'my-stuff.core)
nil
user=> (my-stuff.core/-main)
Hello, World!
nil
user=> (require '[clj-http.client :as http])
nil
user=> (def response (http/get "http://leiningen.org"))
#'user/response
user=> (keys response)
(:trace-redirects :status :headers :body)
The call to -main shows both println output ("Hello, World!") and
the return value (nil) together.
Built-in documentation is available via doc, while clojuredocs
offers more thorough examples from the
ClojureDocs site:
user=> (doc reduce)
-------------------------
clojure.core/reduce
([f coll] [f val coll])
f should be a function of 2 arguments. If val is not supplied,
returns the result of applying f to the first 2 items in coll, then
applying f to that result and the 3rd item, etc. If coll contains no
items, f must accept no arguments as well, and reduce returns the
result of calling f with no arguments. If coll has only 1 item, it
is returned and f is not called. If val is supplied, returns the
result of applying f to val and the first item in coll, then
applying f to that result and the 2nd item, etc. If coll contains no
items, returns val and f is not called.
user=> (user/clojuredocs pprint)
Loading clojuredocs-client...
========== vvv Examples ================
user=> (def *map* (zipmap
[:a :b :c :d :e]
(repeat
(zipmap [:a :b :c :d :e]
(take 5 (range))))))
#'user/*map*
user=> *map*
{:e {:e 4, :d 3, :c 2, :b 1, :a 0}, :d {:e 4, :d 3, :c 2, :b 1, :a 0}, :c {:e 4, :d 3, :c 2, :b 1, :a 0}, :b {:e 4, :d 3, :c 2, :b 1, :a 0}, :a {:e 4, :d 3, :c 2, :b 1, :a 0}}
user=> (clojure.pprint/pprint *map*)
{:e {:e 4, :d 3, :c 2, :b 1, :a 0},
:d {:e 4, :d 3, :c 2, :b 1, :a 0},
:c {:e 4, :d 3, :c 2, :b 1, :a 0},
:b {:e 4, :d 3, :c 2, :b 1, :a 0},
:a {:e 4, :d 3, :c 2, :b 1, :a 0}}
nil
========== ^^^ Examples ================
1 example found for clojure.pprint/pprint
You can even examine the source of functions:
user=> (source my-stuff.core/-main)
(defn -main
"I don't do a whole lot."
[& args]
(println "Hello, World!"))
user=> ; use control+d to exit
If you already have code in a -main function ready to go and don't
need to enter code interactively, the run task is simpler:
$ lein run -m my-stuff.core
Hello, World!
Providing an alternate -m argument will tell Leiningen to look for
the -main function in another namespace. Setting a default :main in
project.clj lets you omit -m.
For long-running lein run processes, you may wish to save memory
with the trampoline higher-order task, which allows the Leiningen JVM
process to exit before launching your project's JVM.
$ lein trampoline run -m my-stuff.server 5000
Tests
It's easy to kick off a test run:
$ lein test
lein test my.test.stuff
FAIL in (a-test) (stuff.clj:7)
FIXME, I fail.
expected: (= 0 1)
actual: (not (= 0 1))
Ran 1 tests containing 1 assertions.
1 failures, 0 errors.
Of course, we haven't written any tests yet, so we've just got the
skeleton failing tests that Leiningen gave us with lein new. But
once we fill it in the test suite will become more useful. Sometimes
if you've got a large test suite you'll want to run just one or two
namespaces at a time. You also might want to break up your tests using
test selectors; see lein help test for more details.
Running lein test from the command-line is suitable for regression
testing, but the slow startup time of the JVM makes it a poor fit for
testing styles that require tighter feedback loops. In these cases,
either keep a repl open for running the appropriate call to
clojure.test/run-tests
or look into editor integration such as
clojure-test-mode.
Keep in mind that while keeping a single process around is convenient,
it's easy for that process to get into a state that doesn't reflect
the files on disk—functions that are loaded and then deleted from the
file will remain in memory, making it easy to miss problems arising
from missing functions (often referred to as "getting
slimed"). Because of this it's advised to do a lein test run with a
fresh instance periodically in any case, perhaps before you commit.
What to do with it
Generally speaking, there are three different goals that are typical of Leiningen projects:
- An application you can distribute to end-users
- A server-side application
- A library for other Clojure projects to consume
For the first, you typically build an uberjar. For libraries, you will want to have them published to a repository like Clojars or a private repository. For server-side applications it varies as described below.
Uberjar
The simplest thing to do is to distribute an uberjar. This is a single
standalone executable jar file most suitable for giving to
nontechnical users. For this to work you'll need to specify a
namespace as your :main in project.clj. By this point our
project.clj file should look like this:
(defproject my-stuff "0.1.0-SNAPSHOT"
:description "FIXME: write description"
:url "http://example.com/FIXME"
:license {:name "Eclipse Public License"
:url "http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html"}
:dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.3.0"]
[org.apache.lucene/lucene-core "3.0.2"]
[clj-http "0.4.1"]]
:profiles {:dev {:dependencies [[midje "1.3.1"]]}}
:test-selectors {:default (complement :integration)
:integration :integration
:all (fn [_] true)}
:main my.stuff)
The namespace you specify will need to contain a -main function that
will get called when your standalone jar is run. This namespace should
have a (:gen-class) declaration in the ns form at the top. The
-main function will get passed the command-line arguments. Let's try
something simple in src/my/stuff.clj:
(ns my.stuff
(:gen-class))
(defn -main [& args]
(println "Welcome to my project! These are your args:" args))
Now we're ready to generate your uberjar:
$ lein uberjar
Compiling my.stuff
Compilation succeeded.
Created /home/phil/src/leiningen/my-stuff/target/my-stuff-0.1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
Including my-stuff-0.1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
Including clj-http-0.4.1.jar
Including clojure-1.3.0.jar
Including lucene-core-3.0.2.jar
Created /home/phil/src/leiningen/my-stuff/target/my-stuff-0.1.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar
This creates a single jar file that contains the contents of all your
dependencies. Users can run it with a simple java invocation,
or on some systems just by double-clicking the jar file.
$ java -jar my-stuff-0.1.0-standalone.jar Hello world.
Welcome to my project! These are your args: (Hello world.)
You can run a regular (non-uber) jar with the java
command-line tool, but that requires constructing the classpath
yourself, so it's not a good solution for end-users.
Of course if your users already have Leiningen installed, you can
instruct them to use lein run as described above.
Server-side Projects
There are many ways to get your project deployed as a server-side
application. Aside from the obvious lein run approach, simple
programs can be packaged up as tarballs with accompanied shell scripts
using the lein-tar plugin
and then deployed using
pallet,
chef, or other mechanisms. Debian packages
can be created with lein-deb.
Web applications may be deployed using .war (web application archive)
files created by the
lein-ring plugin. You can
even create
Hadoop projects. These
kinds of deployments are so varied that they are better-handled using
plugins rather than tasks that are built-in to Leiningen itself.
If you do end up involving Leiningen in production, it's very important to ensure you take steps to freeze all the dependencies before deploying, otherwise it could be easy to end up with unrepeatable deployments. It's recommended to use Leiningen to create a deployable artifact in a continuous integration setting. For example, you could have a Jenkins CI server run your project's full test suite, and if it passes, upload a tarball to S3. Then deployment is just a matter of pulling down and extracting the known-good tarball on your production servers.
Publishing Libraries
If your project is a library and you would like others to be able to use it as a dependency in their projects, you will need to get it into a public repository. While it's possible to maintain your own private repository or get it into Central, the easiest way is to publish it at Clojars. Once you have created an account there, publishing is easy:
$ lein deploy clojars
Created ~/src/my-stuff/target/my-stuff-0.1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
Wrote ~/src/my-stuff/pom.xml
No credentials found for clojars
See `lein help deploying` for how to configure credentials.
Username: me
Password:
Retrieving my-stuff/my-stuff/0.1.0-SNAPSHOT/maven-metadata.xml (1k)
from https://clojars.org/repo/
Sending my-stuff/my-stuff/0.1.0-SNAPSHOT/my-stuff-0.1.0-20120531.032047-14.jar (5k)
to https://clojars.org/repo/
Sending my-stuff/my-stuff/0.1.0-SNAPSHOT/my-stuff-0.1.0-20120531.032047-14.pom (3k)
to https://clojars.org/repo/
Retrieving my-stuff/my-stuff/maven-metadata.xml (1k)
from https://clojars.org/repo/
Sending my-stuff/my-stuff/0.1.0-SNAPSHOT/maven-metadata.xml (1k)
to https://clojars.org/repo/
Sending my-stuff/my-stuff/maven-metadata.xml (1k)
to https://clojars.org/repo/
Once that succeeds it will be available as a package on which other
projects may depend. For instructions on storing your credentials so
they don't have to be re-entered every time, see lein help deploying.
For further details about publishing including setting up private
repositories, see the
deploy guide
That's It!
Now go start coding your next project!