Remote Require for Clojure

Require any Clojure snippet on-the-fly from anywhere in the Internet!

Rationale

For example, James Reeves wrote a library of useful utility functions, medley. But you don’t need everything from it, you need just assoc-some. It would be a waste to include a whole library just to use a single function!

Meet Remote Require!

Usage

Add remote-require dependency to your project (just once):

io.github.tonsky/remote-require {:git/sha "c9027682287f48cd89450839b18e6c69758fc343"}

Go to the file you are interested in, e.g. src/medley/core.cljc
Find a function that you need, e.g. assoc-some
Include it!

(require '[remote-require.core :as rr])

(rr/from "https://github.com/weavejester/medley/master/src/medley/core.cljc"
  :require [assoc-some])

That’s it! Now you can use it freely:

(assoc-some {}
  :a 1
  :b nil
  :c 3) ; => {:a 1, :c 3}

Examples

; File in Github repo
(rr/from "https://github.com/weavejester/medley/d1e00337cf6c0843fb6547aadf9ad78d981bfae5/src/medley/core.cljc"
  :require [dissoc-in assoc-some regexp?])

; Gist
(rr/from "https://gist.githubusercontent.com/calebphillips/240dd6162aefb77584a88249b009fbe6/raw/d8b5a865e7a58bab7da48493a64db848d4f8c0f5/cal.clj"
  :require [left-pad right-pad])

; Twitter
(rr/from "https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1584629264909225984"
  :require [zip now clamp between?])

Highlights

Works directly from the REPL, no restart required
Caches fetched pages locally (in ~/.clj-remote-require), so will work offline after initial fetch
Can import functions, variables and macros
Only imports what you explicitly asked for, stripping away everything else
Allows reasonable amount of extra text in sources (as long as it can’t be confused with Clojure code)

Supported sources

Github
Gist (only RAW output)
Twitter
Anything else that serves “clean enough” HTML page

How does it work?

What happens under the hood is:

URL is fetched
Resulting page is cached locally for future repeated imports
Clojure part of HTML is parsed
(defn <your-symbol> ...) is found
Macro outputs defn content into current namespace
If something goes wrong, exception is thrown

Best practices

Try to refernce immutable sources like Github + SHA or Twitter
In Github, press Y to switch from master to current SHA

Limitations

Does not resolve dependencies or namespace aliases
If one fn depends on the other, importing both should work though

; Github repo, `map-keys` depends on `editable?` and `reduce-map`
(rr/from "https://github.com/weavejester/medley/blob/master/src/medley/core.cljc"
  :require [editable? reduce-map map-keys])

Can’t import functions with the same name from different sources (one will override another)

tonsky / remote-require