"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 for automating Clojure projects without setting your hair on fire.
If your preferred package manager has a relatively recent version of Leiningen, try that first. Otherwise you can install by hand:
Leiningen bootstraps itself using the lein shell script;
there is no separate install script. It installs its dependencies
upon the first run on unix, so the first run will take longer.
- Download the script.
- Place it on your
$PATH. (I like to use~/bin) - Set it to be executable. (
chmod 755 ~/bin/lein)
The link above will get you the stable release. The Leiningen 2 preview release has some great new features, but not all projects and plugins have been upgraded to work with it yet. Please see the upgrade guide for instructions on migrating to version 2.
On Windows most users can get
the batch file.
If you have wget.exe or curl.exe already installed and in PATH, you
can just run lein self-install, otherwise get the standalone jar from the
downloads page.
If you have Cygwin you should be able to use
the shell script above rather than the batch file.
The tutorial has a detailed walk-through of the steps involved in creating a new project, but here are the commonly-used tasks:
$ lein new [TEMPLATE] NAME # generate a new project skeleton
$ lein test [TESTS] # run the tests in the TESTS namespaces, or all tests
$ lein repl # launch an interactive REPL session
$ lein jar # package up the whole project as a .jar file
$ lein install # install a project into the local repository
$ lein search [TERM] # find jars for your project.clj dependencies
Use lein help to see a complete list. lein help $TASK shows the
usage for a specific task.
You can also chain tasks together in a single command by using commas:
$ lein clean, test foo.test-core, jar
Most tasks need to be run from somewhere inside a project directory to
work, but some (new, help, search, version, and repl) may
run from anywhere.
The project.clj file in the project root should look like this:
(defproject myproject "0.5.0-SNAPSHOT"
:description "A project for doing things."
:url "http://github.com/technomancy/myproject"
:dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.2.1"]]
:plugins [[lein-ring "0.4.5"]])To find specific versions of a dependency, use lein search, though
note that this can be extremely slow the first time you use it.
The lein new task generates a project skeleton with an appropriate
starting point from which you can work. See the
sample.project.clj
file (also available via lein help sample) for a detailed listing of
configuration options.
In Leiningen 2.x you can change the configuration of your project by applying various profiles. For instance, you may want to have a few extra test data directories on the classpath during development without including them in the jar, or you may want to have Swank Clojure available in every project you hack on without modifying every single project.clj you use.
By default the :dev, :user, and :default profiles are activated
for each task, but the settings they provide are not propagated
downstream to projects that depend upon yours. Each profile is defined
as a map which gets merged into your project map. To add resources
directories during development, add a :profiles key to project.clj
like so:
(defproject myproject "0.5.0-SNAPSHOT"
:description "A project for doing things."
:dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.2.1"]]
:profiles {:dev {:resources-path ["dummy-data"]}})You can place any arbitrary defproject entries into a given profile
and they will be merged into the project map when that profile is
active. In addition to project.clj, profiles specified in
~/.lein/profiles.clj will be available in all projects, though those
from profiles.clj will be overridden by profiles of the same name in
the project.clj file. This is why the :user profile is separate
from :dev; the latter is intended to be specified in the project
itself. In order to avoid collisions, the project should never define
a :user profile, nor should profiles.clj define a :dev profile.
If you want to access dependencies during development time for any
project place them in your :user profile.
{:user {:plugins [[lein-swank "1.4.0"]
[lein-pprint "1.1.1"]]}}Another use of profiles is to test against various sets of dependencies:
(defproject swank-clojure "1.5.0-SNAPSHOT"
:description "Swank server connecting Clojure to Emacs SLIME"
:dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.2.1"]
[clj-stacktrace "0.2.4"]
[cdt "1.2.6.2"]]
:profiles {:1.3 {:dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.3.0"]]}
:1.4 {:dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.4.0-beta1"]]}})To activate other profiles for a given run, use the with-profile
higher-order task:
$ lein with-profile 1.3 test :database
Multiple profiles may be combined with commas:
$ lein with-profile qa,user test :database
Multiple profiles may be executed in series with colons:
$ lein with-profile 1.3:1.4 test :database
A single with-profile call does not apply across task comma-chains.
To see how a given profile affects your project map, use the lein-pprint plugin:
$ lein with-profile 1.4 pprint
{:compile-path "/home/phil/src/leiningen/lein-pprint/classes",
:group "lein-pprint",
:source-path ("/home/phil/src/leiningen/lein-pprint/src"),
:dependencies
([org.clojure/tools.nrepl "0.0.5" :exclusions [org.clojure/clojure]]
[clojure-complete "0.1.4" :exclusions [org.clojure/clojure]]
[org.thnetos/cd-client "0.3.3" :exclusions [org.clojure/clojure]]),
:target-path "/home/phil/src/leiningen/lein-pprint/target",
:name "lein-pprint",
[...]
:description "Pretty-print a representation of the project map."}
Leiningen supports plugins which may contain both new tasks and hooks
that modify behaivour of existing tasks. See
the plugins wiki page
for a full list. If a plugin is needed for successful test or build
runs, (such as lein-tar) then it should be added to :plugins in
project.clj, but if it's for your own convenience (such as
swank-clojure) then it should be added to the :plugins list in the
:user profile from ~/.lein/profiles.clj. The
plugin guide
explains how to write plugins.
Q: How do you pronounce Leiningen?
A: It's LINE-ing-en. ['laɪnɪŋən]
Q: What's a group ID? How do snapshots work?
A: See the
tutorial
for background.
Q: How should I pick my version numbers?
A: Use semantic versioning.
Q: What if my project depends on jars that aren't in any repository?
A: The deploy guide
explains how to set up a private repository. If you are not sharing
them with a team you could also just
install locally.
In general it's easiest to deploy them to a private S3 bucket with
the s3-wagon-private plugin.
Q: I want to hack two projects in parallel, but it's annoying to switch between them.
A: If you create a directory called checkouts in your project
root and symlink some other project roots into it, Leiningen will
allow you to hack on them in parallel. That means changes in the
dependency will be visible in the main project without having to go
through the whole install/switch-projects/deps/restart-repl cycle,
and the copy in checkouts will take precedence over the dependency
declared in project.clj. Note that this is not a replacement for
listing the project in :dependencies; it simply supplements that for
convenience.
Q: Is it possible to exclude indirect dependencies?
A: Yes. Some libraries, such as log4j, depend on projects that are
not included in public repositories and unnecessary for basic
functionality. Projects listed as :dependencies may exclude
any of their dependencies by using the :exclusions key. See
lein help sample for details.
Q: Why doesn't deps task populate the lib directory in version 2?
A: The only reason version 1 copied the jars around in the first
place was to support existing tooling that needed a cheap way to
calculate a project's classpath. Now that Leiningen has a mature
plugin ecosystem, this is no longer needed; jars can be referenced
directly out of the ~/.m2/repository directory. If you need to see
a listing of all the dependencies that will be used and their
versions, use lein deps :tree.
Q: What does java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: clojure.lang.RestFn.<init>(I)V mean?
A: It means you have some code that was AOT (ahead-of-time)
compiled with a different version of Clojure than the one you're
currently using. If it persists after running lein clean then it
is a problem with your dependencies. Note that for
your own project that AOT compilation in Clojure is much less
important than it is in other languages. There are a few
language-level features that must be AOT-compiled to work, generally
for Java interop. If you are not using any of these features, you
should not AOT-compile your project if other projects may depend
upon it.
Q: I'm behind an HTTP proxy; how can I fetch my dependencies?
A: Set the $http_proxy environment variable in Leiningen 2.x.
For Leiningen 1.x versions, see the instructions for
configuring a Maven proxy
using ~/.m2/settings.xml.
Q: What can be done to speed up launch?
A: The main delay involved in Leiningen comes from starting the
JVM. Most people use a development cycle that involves keeping a
single REPL process running for as long as you're working on that
project. Depending on your editor you may be able to do this via its
Clojure integration. (See
swank-clojure or
VimClojure, for
example.) Otherwise you can use the basic lein repl.
Q: Still too slow; what else can make startup faster?
A: If you are running an older version of Leiningen (before 1.7)
you can export LEIN_JVM_OPTS=-XX:+TieredCompilation to improve
boot time. This requires Hotspot version 20 or newer. On newer versions
of Leiningen it is enabled automatically.
Q: Why is Leiningen 2 still in a preview release?
A: As of the preview3 release, Leiningen 2 is very stable and
recommended for general use. The main thing keeping it from a final
release is the fact that the current Clojars repository
mingles snapshots with releases,
which is undesirable. Since switching the default repositories to a
releases-only Clojars (which is still in development) would be a
breaking change, a series of previews is being released in the mean time.
Q: I don't have access to stdin inside my project.
A: This is a limitation of the JVM's process-handling methods;
none of them expose stdin correctly. This means that functions like
read-line will not work as expected in most contexts, though the
repl task necessarily includes a workaround. You can also use the
trampoline task to launch your project's JVM after Leiningen's has
exited rather than launching it as a subprocess.
Please report issues on the
GitHub issue tracker
or the mailing list.
Personal email addresses are not appropriate for bug reports. See
the
readme for the leiningen-core library
and doc/PLUGINS.md for more details on how Leiningen's codebase is
structured. Design discussions also occur in the
#leiningen channel on Freenode.
Patches are preferred as GitHub pull requests, though patches from
git format-patch are also welcome on the mailing list. Please use
topic branches when sending pull requests rather than committing
directly to master in order to minimize unnecessary merge commit
clutter.
Contributors who have had a single patch accepted may request commit rights on the mailing list or in IRC. Please use your judgment regarding potentially-destabilizing work and branches. Other contributors will usually be glad to review topic branches before merging if you ask on IRC or the mailing list.
Contributors are also welcome to request a free Leiningen sticker by asking on the mailing list and mailing a self-addressed, stamped envelope.
You don't need to "build" Leiningen per se, but when you're using a checkout you will need to get its dependencies in place.
For the master branch, use Leiningen 1.x to run lein install in the
leiningen-core subproject directory. When the dependencies change
you will also have to do rm .lein-classpath in the project root.
Once you've done that, symlink bin/lein to somewhere on your
$PATH, usually as lein2 in order to keep it distinct from your
existing installation.
If you want to develop on the 1.x branch, this should be unnecessary.
Source Copyright © 2009-2012 Phil Hagelberg, Alex Osborne, Dan Larkin, and contributors. Distributed under the Eclipse Public License, the same as Clojure uses. See the file COPYING.
Thanks to Stuart Halloway for Lancet and Tim Dysinger for convincing me that good builds are important.
Images Copyright © 2010 Phil Hagelberg. Distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution + ShareAlike License. Full-size version available.
