clojuresque – a Clojure plugin for Gradle

What is Gradle?

Gradle is a build system written in Java and Groovy. One advantage of Gradle is, that the build script itself is also a Groovy script. That means whatever can be done in Groovy can be done in the build script. This is useful to abstract away common patterns in the build like repetition or conditional decisions.

On top of that Gradle provides a convenient build system which comes in form of different plugins. Each plugin defines certain conventions which (if followed) automasie 95% of the build completely. Still the conventions are freely configurable to be adapted to different project structures.

What is clojuresque?

clojuresque is now a plugin for Gradle, which adds Clojure support. It allows compilation with automatic namespace recognition. The plugin is based on the Java plugin and hooks into the standard configurations and archives.

Contrary to the Groovy plugin, there is no special groovy configuration. Java code in the same project might want to hook into [Clojure][] as well. So the [Clojure][] jar must be available also to the Java portion of the project.

Caveats

• Automatic recognition of namespaces only works if the ns form is the first in the file. Comments may precede the form. The symbol is allowed to be fully qualified: clojure.core/ns.

Usage

Create a build.gradle script in the root directory of your project. Note that gradle derives the project name from the name of this directory!

buildscript {
    repositories {
        maven { url 'http://clojars.org/repo' }
    }
    dependencies {
        classpath 'clojuresque:clojuresque-base:1.6.0'
    }
}

group = 'example.group'
version = '1.0.0'

apply plugin: 'clojure-min'

clojure {
    warnOnReflection = true
    aotCompile = true
}

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
}

dependencies {
    compile 'org.clojure:clojure:1.5.1'
}

Filter

In the filesets you can specify filters with include resp. exclude. This is fine for mostly file based languages. However clojure is strongly based on namespaces. Therefor the clojure part of the source sets support also clojureIncludeNamespace and clojureExcludeNamespace which can be used to filter on the namespace name. Eg. to exclude examples from the final jar one could use

sourceSets.main.clojure {
    clojureExcludeNamespace 'my.project.examples.**.*'
}

Issues

This is alpha software! Expect problems! Please report issues in the bugtracker at bitbucket. Or email them to me.

General support is available on the clojuresque google group.

-- Meikel Brandmeyer mb@kotka.de Frankfurt am Main, October 2013