"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.
Building Clojure projects with tools designed for Java can be an exercise in frustration. If you use Ant, you end up copying around a lot of the same tasks around between XML files on all your projects; there's a lot of repetition. Maven avoids repetition, but provides very little transparency into what's really going on behind the scenes and forces you to become a Maven expert to script a nontrivial build. Either way you end up writing far more XML than is necessary.
With Leiningen, your build is described using Clojure. You can put any code you like in your project.clj file; the only requirement is that it includes a call to defproject. You can define your own tasks in there if you need to, but the majority of projects should be able to get by on the tasks that are provided with Leiningen. If you do find a common task that you need to add, you can implement it as a plugin rather than copying and pasting among each of your projects.
Leiningen bootstraps itself using the 'lein' shell script you download, there is no separate 'install script'. It installs its dependencies in $HOME/.m2/repository.
- Download the script.
- Place it on your path and chmod it to be executable.
- Run: lein self-install
This only works with stable versions of Leiningen; for development versions see "Hacking" below.
On Windows you can download lein.bat, instead, though support on that platform is still experimental.
$ lein deps # install dependencies in lib/
$ lein test [TESTS] # run the tests in the TESTS namespaces, or all tests
$ 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 pom # output a pom.xml file for interop with Maven
$ lein install # install in local repository
$ lein help [TASK] # show a list of tasks or help for a given TASK
$ lein new NAME # generate a new project skeleton
Place a project.clj file in the project root that looks something like this:
(defproject leiningen "0.5.0-SNAPSHOT"
:description "A build tool designed not to set your hair on fire."
:url "http://github.com/technomancy/leiningen"
:dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.1.0-alpha-SNAPSHOT"]
[org.clojure/clojure-contrib "1.0-SNAPSHOT"]
[ant/ant-launcher "1.6.2"]
[org.apache.maven/maven-ant-tasks "2.0.10"]]
:dev-dependencies [[org.clojure/swank-clojure "1.0"]])
Other keys accepted:
- :namespaces - a list of namespaces on which to perform AOT-compilation.
- :main - specify a namespace to use as main for an executable jar.
- :repositories - additional maven repositories to search for dependencies. Specify this as a map of repo IDs to URLs.
- :source-path, :compile-path, :library-path, :test-path, :resources-path - alternate paths for src/, classes/, lib/, resources/, and test/ directories.
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 in it. Leiningen builds on Lancet, but takes
things further. In addition, it 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 treat it as a standard library of build-related
functions and are able to write it with a more pleasing syntax, it's
not bad.
Q: What's a group ID? How do snapshots work?
A: See the
intro
for background on JVM dependency concepts.
Q: What if my project depends on jars that aren't in any repository?
A: Open-source jars can be uploaded to Clojars (see "Publishing"
below), though be sure to use the groupId of "org.clojars.$USERNAME"
in order to avoid conflicts and to allow the original authors to
claim it in the future once they get around to uploading.
Alternatively you can install into your local repository in ~/.m2
with Maven for Java libs or "lein install" for Clojure libs.
Q: What does java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: clojure.lang.RestFn.(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. If you depend on contrib, make
sure the contrib version matches the Clojure version. Also note 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: It looks like the classpath isn't honoring project.clj.
A: Leiningen runs many things in a subclassloader so it can
control the classpath and other things. Because of this, the
standard (System/getProperty "java.class.path") call will return the
classpath that Leiningen runs in, not the one that your project is
run in. Your project's classpath is stored in the user/classpath var.
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, as demonstrated here:
[log4j "1.2.15" :exclusions [javax.mail/mail
javax.jms/jms
com.sun.jdmk/jmxtools
com.sun.jmx/jmxri]]
Q: How should I pick my version numbers?
A: Use semantic versioning.
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. The maven-ant-tasks API is much more manageable.
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, which is a Clojure-specific repository for open-source code. Once you have created an account there, publishing is easy:
$ lein jar
$ scp $PROJECT.jar clojars@clojars.org:
Once that succeeds it will be available for other projects to depend on. Leiningen adds Clojars and the Clojure nightly build snapshots to the default repositories.
You'll need to bootstrap using a stable release before you can hack on Leiningen. Grab the stable bin script (linked under "Installation" above), put it on your $PATH as "lein-stable", and do "lein-stable self-install". Then run "lein-stable deps" in your checkout. When that finishes, symlink bin/lein from your checkout to your path. This will make "lein" run from your checkout while "lein-stable" uses the jar self-installed in ~/.m2.
The mailing list and the leiningen or clojure channels on Freenode are the best places to bring up questions or suggestions. If you're planning on adding a feature or fixing a nontrivial bug, please discuss it first to avoid duplicating effort. If you haven't discussed it on the mailing list, please include in your pull request details of what problem your patch intendeds to solve as well as the approach you took.
Contributions are preferred as either Github pull requests or using "git format-patch" and the mailing list as is requested for contributing to Clojure itself. Please use standard indentation with no tabs, trailing whitespace, or lines longer than 80 columns. If you've got some time on your hands, reading this style guide wouldn't hurt either.
Leiningen is extensible; you can define new tasks in plugins. Add your plugin as a dev-dependency of your project, and you'll be able to call "lein $YOUR_COMMAND". See the lein-swank directory for an example of a plugin.
See the complete list of known issues.
Copyright (C) 2009 Phil Hagelberg, Alex Osborne, and Dan Larkin
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.