New Gradle Users

This example assumes Gradle 6 or higher.

Gradle is a build automation tool in the same space as Maven, Leiningen, and Boot. Gradle is primarily targeted at projects using the JVM, but has plugins for many other languages. (Now including Clojure!)

Installing Gradle

See Gradle’s installation documentation.

Initializing a project

$ mkdir my-project
$ cd my-project
$ gradle init --type basic --dsl groovy

From here on out you’ll use ./gradlew instead of gradle in your commands. gradlew is the Gradle Wrapper which allows you to set a per-project Gradle version. This ensures all developers use the same Gradle version for the project, instead of whatever happens to be on their PATH.

Also see Gradle’s Learning the Basics.

Adding the plugin

To include plugins from Gradle’s Plugin Portal you’ll use a plugins {} block. This should be at the top of your build.gradle.

build.gradle
plugins {
  id 'dev.clojurephant.clojure' version '0.7.0'
  // any additional plugins declared here
}

Also see Gradle’s Using Plugins.

Configuring project information

build.gradle
group = 'my.example' // the group ID your artifacts should be published under
version = '0.1.0-SNAPSHOT' // the version your artifacts should be published under

Define dependencies

See Gradle’s Dependency Management docs.

Repositories

No repositories are specified by default, so you must list any repositories you want to search for your dependencies.

Clojure projects commonly need both Maven Central and Clojars.

build.gradle
repositories {
  mavenCentral()
  maven {
    name = 'Clojars' // name can be ommitted, but is helpful in troubleshooting
    url = 'https://repo.clojars.org/'
  }
}

Also see Gradle’s Declaring Repositories.

Dependencies

Unless you have a reason to do otherwise, use Gradle’s shorthand syntax <configuration> '<group>:<artifact>:<version>' (e.g. implementation 'org.clojure:clojure:1.9.0') to specify dependencies.

Dependencies are put in different configurations (somewhat similar to Maven scopes). For Clojure’s purposes, the three main ones to be aware of are:

  • implementation - dependencies of your main application code

  • testImplementation - dependencies of your test code

  • devImplementation - dependencies used only in the REPL

build.gradle
dependencies {
  implementation 'org.clojure:clojure:1.11.1'

  // due to how clojure.test is executed, a JUnit test engine (Jovial) is needed
  testRuntimeOnly 'org.ajoberstar:jovial:0.3.0'

  // due to the way Gradle's REPL is started, if you need tools.namespace, you must be on 0.3+
  devImplementation 'org.clojure:tools.namespace:1.3.0'
}

// due to how clojure.test is executed, the JUnit platform is needed
tasks.withType(Test) {
  useJUnitPlatform()
}

Also see Gradle’s Declaring Dependencies

Putting it all together

Full build.gradle example:

build.gradle
plugins {
  id 'dev.clojurephant.clojure' version '0.7.0'
}

group = 'my.example'
version = '0.1.0-SNAPSHOT'

repositories {
  mavenCentral()
  maven {
    name = 'Clojars' // name can be ommitted, but is helpful in troubleshooting
    url = 'https://repo.clojars.org/'
  }
}

dependencies {
  implementation 'org.clojure:clojure:1.11.1'

  testRuntimeOnly 'org.ajoberstar:jovial:0.3.0'

  devImplementation 'org.clojure:tools.namespace:1.3.0'
}

tasks.withType(Test) {
  useJUnitPlatform()
}