For a spartan set-up, for now, to rapidly get you going, I suggest just using a text editor and a terminal window or two. Details below.

Note: Later, you will likely want to use a more productive setup, where you’ll have access to the repl from within your editor. But for now, we’ll walk before we run.

1 Text Editor Setup

If you’d like to use GNU Emacs, see my 10-minute Emacs + Clojure guide, or else the “Clojure with Emacs” guide at the clojure-doc.org site.

If you’d like to use Emacs, Vim, or Eclipse, see their respective tutorials at clojure-doc.

For an easy-to-use GUI editor, maybe try jEdit or some of the other tools list at http://clojure.org/community/resources.

2 Clojure Projects

Whenever you want to start writing a Clojure application or library, it’s most common to first create a new project for it.

Aside: You can also create a self-contained Clojure program in its own single source code file, like a shell script. That is covered later, in the Standalone Scripts chapter. For now though, we’ll discuss the customary way of creating a Clojure program, which is to create a project for it.

A project is just a directory (named after the project) which should contain:

• a project.clj file,
• a README.md file,
• a subdirectory containing your source code,
• a subdirectory containing tests,
• a subdirectory containing docs, and
• usually, some other sundry files (ex. LICENSE.txt, NEWS.md, etc.).

The tool that’s used to create and manage Clojure projects is called Leiningen (“line-ing-en”), or just “lein” for short (which is also the name of the Leiningen command-line program). We’ll discuss lein in greater detail in a later chapter.

There’s also a tool called boot, not discussed further in this guide.

To start tinkering around with some Clojure code, we first need to install Leiningen and then use it to create a little project within which to work.

Create a ~/bin dir if you don’t already have one, and make sure it’s on your $PATH. Install lein (as described on its website) like so:

cd ~/bin
wget https://raw.github.com/technomancy/leiningen/stable/bin/lein
chmod +x lein
lein version  # It will download and install dependencies.

(Lein’s self-install will create ~/.lein and ~/.m2 directories.)

2.1 An app project example

Create a new project for an application program like so:

$ cd ~/temp
$ lein new app my-app
Generating a project called my-app based on the 'app' template.
$ cd my-app

Open project.clj in your editor and — to keep our future output filenames down to a reasonable length ☺ — change the version string from “0.1.0-SNAPSHOT” to just “0.1.0”.

Open up src/my_app/core.clj in your editor as well.

Note: for your project directory, and in your source code, you use the hyphen (here, “my-app”), but — due to requirements of the underlying Java platform — corresponding subdirectory names below the project directory must instead use an underscore (“my_app”).

The src/my_app/core.clj -main function is just what it looks like; your program’s main entry point. Back in your terminal, from your project directory, start up a repl and call -main:

$ lein repl
... {snip version info}
my-app.core=> (-main)
Hello, World!
nil

Over in your editor, change that “Hello, World!” text to something else and save the file. Now back in the repl, manually reload the file and run -main again to see your changes:

my-app.core=> (require 'my-app.core :reload)
nil
my-app.core=> (-main)
Hello, You!
nil

Quit the repl using Ctrl-d and run your program using lein like so:

$ lein run

When you’re happy with your app, package it up into an executable jar file and copy the resulting jar to your ~/bin directory:

$ lein uberjar
...
$ cp target/uberjar/my-app-0.1.0-standalone.jar ~/bin

Run it from anywhere, using the java command, like any other executable jar file:

$ java -jar ~/bin/my-app-0.1.0-standalone.jar
Hello, You!

You can now send just that jar file to a friend and they should be able to run it likewise (as long as they have Java installed)! ☺

To make it even easier to run your Clojure app from the command line, see distributing apps.

2.2 A library project example

To create a Clojure library:

cd ~/temp
lein new default my-lib   # Or `lein new my-lib` for short.
cd my-lib

In your editor, open src/my_lib/core.clj and between the (ns my-lib.core) and the (defn foo ...) expressions, add your own function:

(defn my-func
  "Docstring for my-func."
  [x]
  (* x x))

Save the file. Back in the terminal, start up a repl and try out that new function:

$ lein repl
...
user=> (require 'my-lib.core)
nil
user=> (ns my-lib.core)
nil
my-lib.core=> (my-func 3)
9

In my-func, change the “*” to a “+”, then reload and try out your changes:

my-lib.core=> (require 'my-lib.core :reload)
nil
my-lib.core=> (my-func 3)
6

3 A REPL without a project

Incidentally, anytime you want to fire up a repl — say, for reading docstrings or for just trying things out — you can do so outside of and without need of a project. For example:

$ cd ~/temp   # Not a lein project dir.
$ lein repl
...
user=>