anticrisis / cljs-lib-template

Template for ClojureScript libraries in a nodejs environment

How to build ClojureScript libraries for nodejs

It's 2017, and I wasn't able to find a simple tutorial to using ClojureScript inside a JavaScript nodejs project. There were a few demonstrations of using node to run a ClojureScript project, but what if I just want to build a ClojureScript library into an existing node app?

I expect this basic tooling will come in handy for building business logic libraries in ClojureScript and integrating those libraries into existing JavaScript frameworks like React, Electron or other fancy fancies.

Dependencies

• npm
  • Development dependencies:
  • shelljs
  • minimist

That's all. No Leinengen, Boot, Grunt, Babel, and who knows what else.

For fun, read How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016. This is not that.

Requirements

• java on your path

Usage

1. Download the standalone ClojureScript JAR from Github.

2. Place the cljs.jar file in the cljs-support directory.

3. Type

npm install
npm run release

This will generate the file my_lib.js in the out directory. You can use it like this:

$ node
> l = require('./out/my_lib');
{ core: { ping: [Function: G] } }
> l.core.ping();
'pong'
>

How it works

The ClojureScript JAR is used to build your ClojureScript code, minimize and eliminate all the dead code using the Google Closure Library, and a release script is used to wrap everything up so it can be found by CommonJS, RequireJS and HTML.