mtyzz / houseplant-helper

Code your own houseplant watering schedule in Clojure!

Houseplant-helper

A companion project to The Beginner's Guide to Programming (in Clojure!)

Got a lot of houseplants? Generate a watering schedule--in Clojure! By the end of writing this program, you will be able to:

• Set up Clojure project with dependencies
• Call an API
• Turn api data into something useful
• Output a file onto your machine

Commands:

• clj -m --help ;; lists commands
• clj -m --houseplants ;; lists houseplants the program knows about
• clj -m --schedule [array of houseplants] ;; produces your houseplant watering schedule

Further reading:

(How tools.deps works)[https://clojure.org/reference/deps_and_cli] (The little API this project is calling)[]

Contents

Every Clojure project has the following:

1. (src directory)[]: contains all the "business logic*" namespaces
2. (test directory)[]: contains one test for each namespace
3. (dependencies file)[]: we are using tools.deps. There is another dependency manager called leiningen that uses a file called project.clj instead of deps.clj. You can read more about it in the dependencies section of the Beginner's Guide.

This project has four namespaces:

1. client: communicates with the api to retrieve data
2. scheduler: uses the data retrieved by client to build your houseplant schedule
3. printer: formats your houseplant schedule and prints it to a file on your computer
4. main: listens to command line arguments and runs the program based on the arguments it receives. Most Clojure programs have a main namespace.

To understand why the project is organized this way, please refer to the Separation of concerns section in the Beginner's Guide

This project also has a seed data file to use for tests and can be run in the REPL in case there is no API available. See the REPL section in the Beginner's Guide.