2017-08-27: I’ve published an updated version here.

Leiningen, a Clojure build tool, has the concept of profiles. One thing profiles are useful for is allowing you to have development tools available to a project without having them as dependencies when you release your project. An example of when you might want to do this is when you are using a testing library like expectations.

Some development tools, such as lein-test-refresh, are useful to have across most of your Clojure projects. Rather nicely, Leiningen supports adding global profiles to ~/.lein/profiles.clj. These profiles are available in all your projects.

Below is most of my profiles.clj. I’ve removed some sensitive settings and what is left are the development tools that I find useful.

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{:user {:plugin-repositories [["private-plugins" {:url "private repo url"}]]
        :dependencies [[pjstadig/humane-test-output "0.6.0"]]
        :injections [(require 'pjstadig.humane-test-output)
                     (pjstadig.humane-test-output/activate!)]
        :plugins [[cider/cider-nrepl "0.8.2"]
                  [refactor-nrepl "0.2.2"]
                  [com.jakemccrary/lein-test-refresh "0.5.5"]
                  [lein-autoexpect "1.4.2"]
                  [lein-ancient "0.5.5"]
                  [jonase/eastwood "0.2.1"]
                  [lein-kibit "0.0.8"]
                  [lein-pprint "1.1.2"]]
        :test-refresh {:notify-command ["terminal-notifier" "-title" "Tests" "-message"]}}}

:plugin-repositories [["private-plugins" {:url "private repo url"}]] sets a private plugin repository. This allows me to use Outpace’s private Leiningen templates for setting up new projects for work.

The next few lines are all related. They setup humane-test-output. humane-test-output makes clojure.test output more readable. It makes using clojure.test much more enjoyable. I highly recommend it. Sample output can be found in my Comparing Clojure Testing Libraries post.

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:dependencies [[pjstadig/humane-test-output "0.6.0"]]
:injections [(require 'pjstadig.humane-test-output)
             (pjstadig.humane-test-output/activate!)]

Next we get to my :plugins section. This is the bulk of my profiles.clj.

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:plugins [[cider/cider-nrepl "0.8.2"]
          [refactor-nrepl "0.2.2"]
          [com.jakemccrary/lein-test-refresh "0.5.5"]
          [lein-autoexpect "1.4.2"]
          [lein-ancient "0.5.5"]
          [jonase/eastwood "0.2.1"]
          [lein-kibit "0.0.8"]
          [lein-pprint "1.1.2"]]

The first entry is for cider/cider-nrepl. I write Clojure using Emacs and CIDER and much of CIDER’s functionality exists in nrepl middleware found in cider/cider-nrepl. This dependency is required for me to be effective while writing Clojure.

refactor-nrepl is next. clj-refactor.el requires it for some refactorings. I actually don’t use any of those refactorings (I only use move to let, extract to let, and introduce let refactorings) but I still keep it around.

com.jakemccrary/lein-test-refresh is next. This lets me use lein-test-refresh globally. lein-test-refresh runs your clojure.test tests whenever a file changes in your project. This is another key development tool in my process.

Up next is lein-autoexpect. It was the first Leiningen plugin I wrote and it enables continuous testing with expectations.

Both lein-autoexpect and lein-test-refresh are projects I created and maintain. Writing lein-autoexpect was my first exposure to continuous testing and it changed how I develop code. I find it frustrating to develop without such a tool.

Next up is lein-ancient. It checks your project.clj for outdated dependencies and plugins. It isn’t something that gets used every day but it is super useful when you need it.

The next two entries are for jonase/eastwood and lein-kibit. They are both tools that look at your Clojure code and report common mistakes. I don’t use either consistently but I do find them useful. I’ve found bugs with eastwood.

The final plugin is lein-pprint. lein-pprint prints out your project map. It is useful for trying to grasp what is going on when messing around with various Leiningen options.

The final part, seen below, of my profiles.clj is configuration for lein-test-refresh. It configures lein-test-refresh to use terminal-notifier to notify me when my tests pass or fail. Using a continuous tester that allows flexible notification is useful. Not having to glance at a terminal to see if your tests are passing or failing is great.

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:test-refresh {:notify-command ["terminal-notifier" "-title" "Tests" "-message"]}

That is my ~/.lein/profiles.clj. I don’t think it contains anything mind blowing but it definitely contains a useful collection of Clojure development tools. I encourage you to check out them out and to think about what tools you should be putting into your global :user profile.