Creating Clojure projects

Creating Clojure projects save code as you are learning or developing applications. Using a project is the quickest way to test development tools are configured correctly.

Creating projects using a template is the quickest way to get started, as the template will create the project structure and add libraries the project. Practicalli recommends the Clojure CLI tools and clj-new to create projects.

Install community toolsclj-new and other aliases

Install practicalli/clojure-deps-edn to provide aliases for the community tools used in this guide

Create a project with clj-new and the app template

Open a terminal window and change to a suitable folder

cd projects/clojure

Create a new project using clj-new and the app template. If you prefer, use your company name or GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket account name instead of practicalli and change playground to the name of the application.

clojure -M:project/new app practicalli/playground

New Clojure Exec approach

clj-new also supports Clojure exec and the -X flag, using keywords to specify the options for creating the project. This produces exactly the same project as the command above.

clojure -X:project/new :template app :name practicalli/playground

Running a REPL for the project

Change into the directory and test the project runs by starting a REPL with rebel readline

cd playground && clojure -M:repl/rebel

A repl prompt should appear.

Clojure REPL rebel readline

Type code expressions at the repl prompt and press RETURN to evaluate them.

(+ 1 2 3 4 5)

Try the project with your preferred editor

Using a Clojure aware editor, open the playground project and run the REPL. Then write code expressions in the editor and evaluate them to see the result instantly.

Running the project

Run project with or without an alias:

clojure -M:alias -m domain.app-name
clojure -M -m domain.app-name

In the project deps.edn file it can be useful to define an alias to run the project, specifying the main namespace, the function to run and optionally any default arguments that are passed to that function.

:project/run
{:ns-default domain.main-namespace
 :exec-fn -main
 :exec-args {:port 8888}}

Then the project can be run using clojure -X:project/run and arguments can optionally be included in this command line, to complement or replace any default arguments in exec-args.

Other templates

clj-new has 3 templates that create deps.edn based projects

  • app - a project that will run on the command line
  • lib - a project that will be used as a library (added to other projects as a dependency)
  • template - a project for creating your own custom templates.

clj-new can create projects from deps.edn, Leiningen and Boot templates. A wide range of templates have been created by the Clojure community which can be found by searching on Clojars.org:

clj-deps does not change Leiningen or Boot templates into deps.edn projects. If a deps.edn file is not part of the project it can be manually created.

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