Installing Leiningen

We are used to having certain tools to help us build our code, such as Ant, Maven, and Gradle.

In the Clojure ecosystem, the de facto standard for dependency and build management is Leiningen (affectionately named after the short story "Leiningen versus the Ants", which I recommend reading at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leiningen_Versus_the_Ants); Leiningen strives to be a familiar to Java developers, it gets the best ideas from Maven, like: convention over configuration. It also gets ideas from Ant like custom scripting and plugins.

Installing it is very simple, let's check how to do it on Mac OS X (installing on Linux should be the same) using bash as your default shell.

You should also have Java 7 or 8 already installed and configured in your path.

You can check the detailed instructions on the Leiningen project page http://leiningen.org/. If you want to get a Leiningen installation up and running, this is what you would have to do:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/technomancy/leiningen/stable/bin/lein
# The next step just set up the lein script in your path, you can do it any way you wish
mv lein ~/bin
echo "export PATH=$PATH:~/bin/">> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc
# Everything should be running now, let's test it
lein help

The first time you run the lein command, it downloads everything needed from the internet. This makes it very easy to distribute your code, you can even include the lein script with your own projects and make it easier for other developers to get up and running, the only real requirement is the JDK.