Leiningen

"Leiningen!" he shouted. "You're insane! They're not creatures you can
fight--they're an elemental--an 'act of God!' Ten miles long, two
miles wide--ants, nothing but ants! And every single one of them a
fiend from hell...
-- from Leiningen Versus the Ants by Carl Stephenson

Leiningen is a build tool for Clojure designed to not set your hair on fire.

Install

For now, you will need http://p.hagelb.org/leiningen-deps.tar unpacked in the root and http://p.hagelb.org/lancet.clj on the classpath.

Usage

$ lein deps # install dependencies in lib/

$ lein test [PRED] # run the project's tests, optionally filtered on PRED

$ lein compile # ahead-of-time compile into classes/

$ lein repl # launch a REPL with the project classpath configured

$ lein clean # remove all build artifacts

$ lein jar # create a jar of the project

$ lein uberjar # create a standalone jar that contains all dependencies

$ lein swank [PORT] # launch swank server for Emacs to connect

TODO: new, help, deploy, pom

Configuration

Place a project.clj file in the project root that looks something like this:

(defproject leiningen
  :version "1.0-SNAPSHOT"
  :dependencies [["org.clojure" "clojure" "1.1.0-alpha-SNAPSHOT"]
                 ["org.clojure" "clojure-contrib" "1.0-SNAPSHOT"]
                 ["org.clojure" "lancet" "1.0-SNAPSHOT"]
                 ["org.apache.ant" "ant" "1.7.1"]
                 ["org.apache.ant" "ant-launcher" "1.7.1"]
                 ["org.apache.maven" "maven-ant-tasks" "2.0.10"]])

FAQ

Q: How do you pronounce Leiningen?
A: It's LINE-ing-en. I think.

Q: What does this offer over Lancet?
A: Lancet is more of a library than a build tool. It doesn't predefine any tasks apart from what Ant itself offers, so there is nothing Clojure-specific there. In addition, Leiningen includes some Maven functionality for dependencies.

Q: But Maven is terrifying!
A: That's not a question. Anyway, Leiningen only uses the dependency resolution parts of Maven, which are quite tame. For the actual task execution cycles it uses Ant under the covers via Lancet.

Q: But Ant is terrifying!
A: That's true. Ant is an interpreter for a procedural language with a regrettable syntax. But if you're able to write it with a more pleasing syntax, it's not so bad.

Q: What happened to Corkscrew?
A: I tried, but I really couldn't make the wine metaphor work. That, and the Plexus Classworlds container was an ornery beast causing much frustration.

Q: What about Windows?
A: Patches welcome.

License

Copyright (C) 2009 Phil Hagelberg

Thanks to Stuart Halloway for Lancet and Tim Dysinger for convincing me that good builds are important.

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License, the same as Clojure uses. See the file COPYING.