8.9 KiB
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 building and JVM-land dependency management.
Creating a Project
We'll assume you've got Leiningen installed as per the readme. Generating a new project is easy:
$ lein new myproject
Created new project in: myproject
$ cd myproject
$ tree
.
|-- project.clj
|-- README
|-- src
| `-- myproject
| `-- core.clj
`-- test
`-- myproject
`-- core_test.clj
Here we've got your project's README, a src/ directory containing implementation code, a test/ directory, and a project.clj file which describes your project to Leiningen. The src/myproject/core.clj file corresponds to the myproject.core namespace.
Note that we use that instead of just myproject since single-segment namespaces are discouraged in Clojure. Also the file test/myproject/core_test.clj corresponds with the myproject.core-test namespace--you need to remember to replace dashes in namespace names with underscores in file names on disk since the JVM has trouble loading files with dashes in the name.
Packaging
You can package your project up now, even though at this stage it's fairly useless:
$ lein jar
Created ~/src/myproject/myproject-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
Libraries for the JVM are packaged up as .jar files, which are basically just .zip files with a little extra JVM-specific metadata that contain either .class files (bytecode) or .clj source files. These jar files are available through repositories that serve them up over HTTP alongside their metadata.
project.clj
$ cat project.clj
(defproject myproject "1.0.0-SNAPSHOT"
:description "FIXME: write"
:dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.1.0"]
[org.clojure/clojure-contrib "1.1.0"]])
Fill in the :description with a short paragraph so that your project will show up in search results. At some point you'll need to flesh out the README too, but for now let's skip ahead to setting :dependencies. If you've got a simple pure-clojure project, you will be fine with the default of Clojure and Contrib, but otherwise you'll need to list other dependencies.
Dependencies
Clojars is the Clojure community's centralized jar repository, and it's where you'll find Clojure dependencies for your project. Each dependency even lists out the snippet you'll need to put in your project.clj to use it. Java libraries can be found by searching Jarvana, though you'll need to translate their notation into Leiningen's. Leiningen describes packages using identifiers that look like this:
[org.clojure/swank-clojure "1.2.1"]
- "org.clojure" is called the 'group-id'
- "swank-clojure" is called the 'artifact-id'
- "1.2.1" is the version of the jar file you require
Sometimes versions will end in "-SNAPSHOT". This means that it is not an official release but a development build. In general relying on snapshot dependencies is discouraged, but sometimes its necessary if you need bug fixes etc. that have not made their way into a release yet. Adding a snapshot dependency to your project will cause Leiningen to actively go seek out the latest version of the dependency every time you run lein deps, (whereas normal release versions are cached in the local repository) so if you have a lot of snapshots it will slow things down.
Speaking of the local repository, all the dependencies you pull in using Leiningen or Maven get cached in $HOME/.m2/repository. You can install the current project in there:
$ lein install
Wrote pom.xml
[INFO] Installing myproject-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar to ~/.m2/repository/myproject/myproject/1.0.0-SNAPSHOT/myproject-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
Generally Leiningen will fetch your dependencies on-demand, but if you have just added a new dependency and you want to force it to fetch it, you can do that too:
$ lein deps
Copying 2 files to ~/src/myproject/lib
Copied :dependencies into ~/src/myproject/lib.
Dependencies are downloaded from Clojars, the central Maven (Java) repository, the official Clojure build server, and any other repositories that you add to your project.clj file; see the sample.project.clj.
If you've confirmed that your project will work with a number of different versions of a given dependency, you can provide a range instead of a single version:
[org.clojure/clojure "[1.1,1.2]"] ; <= will match 1.1.0 through 1.2.0.
See Maven's version range specification for details.
Dev Dependencies
Sometimes you want to pull in dependencies that are really only for your convenience while developing; they aren't strictly required for the project to function. Leiningen calls these :dev-dependencies. They're listed in project.clj alongside regular dependencies and downloaded when you run lein deps, but they are not brought along when another project depends on your project. Using swank-clojure for Emacs support would be a typical example; you may not want it included at runtime, but it's useful while you're hacking on the project.
Writing the Code
This is the part Leiningen can't really help you with; you're on your own here. Well--not quite. Leiningen can help you with running your tests.
$ lein test
Testing myproject.core-test
FAIL in (replace-me) (core_test.clj:6)
No tests have been written.
expected: false
actual: false
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 worth:
$ lein test myproject.parser-test
Testing myproject.parser-test
Ran 2 tests containing 10 assertions.
0 failures, 0 errors.
When naming your test namespaces, it's a good idea to pick a name that matches the name of the namespace it's testing, but with a "-test" suffix. In stack traces that come from test failures you'll only see the last segment of the namespace that caused the exception, so it's convenient to have it distinguishable from the implementation namespace.
Compiling
If you're lucky you'll be able to get away without doing any AOT (ahead-of-time) compilation. But there are some Java interop features that require it, so if you need to use them you should add an :aot option into your project.clj file. It should be a seq of namespaces you want AOT-compiled. Again, the sample.project.clj has example usage.
Like dependencies, this should happen for you automatically, but if you need to force it you can:
$ lein compile
Compiling myproject.core
Publishing
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 or get it into Maven central, the easiest way is to publish it at Clojars. Once you have created an account there, publishing is easy:
$ lein jar && lein pom
$ scp pom.xml myproject-1.0.0.jar clojars@clojars.org:
Once that succeeds it will be available for other projects to depend on.
Uberjar
Not all Leiningen projects are libraries though--sometimes you want to distribute your project to end-users who don't want to worry about having a copy of Clojure lying around. You can use the uberjar task to create a standalone executable jar.
For this to work you'll need to specify in project.clj a namespace as your :main that contains a -main function which 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.
$ lein uberjar
Created ~/src/myproject/myproject-1.0.0.jar
Including myproject-1.0.0.jar
Including clojure-contrib-1.1.0.jar
Including clojure-1.1.0.jar
Created myproject-1.0.0-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 myproject-1.0.0-standalone.jar
That's It!
If you prefer a visual introduction, try the Full Disclojure screencast on project management. Now go start coding your next project!