How to set up project.clj for a Clojure project

This looks great:

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.

{: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 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 It checks your project.clj for outdated dependencies and plugins.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.