When I was about to get started with ClojureScript, I was discouraged by the fact that I apparently had to figure out so much before getting a trivial project up and running.
Eventually I learned, built and showed a minimal application running with just Leiningen and Ring, and a little bit of jQuery in ClojureScript.
Some time later Kyle Cordes showed me cljs-template. It’s a Leiningen template created by Chris Granger, also known as the guy behind Noir and Light Table. That was quite fun. All you need to get a project up and running is:
lein new cljs-template my-project cd my-project lein run
That’s it, you’re now running a Noir application with ClojureScript in client (jQuery included). You can start hacking at the CLJS source and see changes in browser immediately.
I soon discovered that it was a few months old, using Clojure 1.3, dated build of ClojureScript and pretty much everything. Eventually (thanks to Kyle and Raynes) I got push access to the project and updated everything, so it should be in even better shape now.
I am not sure where cljs-template is going though, with Noir itself going away. I also found one bit missing: That template is awesome to get up and running and show off a demo, but you would still need to do some manual plumbing to make such a project work for a real application (with leiningen hooks on compilation etc.).
That’s why I created another template: cljs-kickoff. Like my first steps, it’s really minimal: just Ring, lein-cljsbuild and ClojureScript. Fewer files, fewer dependencies, very easy to grasp.
To kick it off, just run:
lein new cljs-kickoff my-project cd my-project lein run
It will compile the ClojureScript file included in the project and start Ring server with it.
In another shell, you can run:
lein cljsbuild auto
This will start lein-cljsbuild in the auto-compile mode. Whenever the CLJS source changes, it will be automatically recompiled and the running application will pick it up after reload.
Compared to cljs-template, this template is much smaller and only uses very basic, popular and mature pieces (just Ring and CLJS). It also has all the “real” Leiningen hooks in place: CLJS compilation is included in lein run, lein jar and lein uberjar.
I hope it all makes someone’s life easier by making the first step on CLJS path as easy as possible. Happy hacking!
Thank you very much for that! This is a convenient and lean setup.
I’ve slightly modified render-app function in server.clj file to use a static app.html file, instead of generating it:
(defn render-app []
(response/redirect “/app.html”))
Tim – I’m glad you like it, thank you!
I wanted to show (or provide “hooks” for) both ways: generated content and static files. You can do everything in Clojure, e.g. with enlive/hiccup/stencil, mix and match with static (e.g. static CSS/JS, generated html), or you can write only the server code in Clojure and serve all content from static – like a single-page JS-heavy webapp. Whatever works best for you, hopefully the template doing both saves you 5 minutes of wondering where to put something. :-)
Oh, man. It saved me much more than five minutes! I’ve opened two terminals as you suggested: one to run a Ring server, the second to auto compile sources.
After that I edit HTML in HTML editor, and edit client.cljs in a text editor. Every time I save cljs-file, lein re-compiles it automatically. It’s perfect.
I can not express enough what a relieve it is to concentrate on a task at hand, rather than spend countless hours configuring all these layers of software running on top of each other.
Thanks for this! I’d like to put my cljs-kickstart app onto heroku, and there’s a nice template for that: https://github.com/technomancy/lein-heroku/tree/master/lein-template Would it be a good idea for me to merge these two templates as a third template? I’d probably call it `heroku-cljs-kickstart`.
Buck – that sounds very interesting. I’ll take a look.
I also thought about templates like “CLJS with jQuery”, “CLJS with Compojure” etc. In a way it’s a shame we have to do this. I wish we could say “gimme CLJS, Compojure and Heroku” without creating a special template for each possible combination. I know why it’s technically challenging (if possible), but one can dream. :-)
Thanks for the template, works perfectly.
As a JS dev trying to get into clojurescript, it is very dauting to set up and realize the workflow, but I’m getting bit by bit.