This library provides the core functionality of Leiningen. This consists of the task execution implementation, project configuration, and helper functions. The built-in tasks and the launcher scripts are kept in the main leiningen project.

More detailed API reference is available.

• leiningen.core.main contains the -main entry point along with task handling functions like apply-task and resolve-task.
• leiningen.core.project has read and defproject for getting a project map from project.clj files. It also handles applying profiles to the project map and loading plugins.
• leiningen.core.classpath is where the project's classpath is calculated. It handles Maven dependencies as well as checkout dependencies.
• leiningen.core.eval houses the eval-in-project function which implements the isolation of project code from Leiningen's own code.
• leiningen.core.user just has a handful of functions which handle user-level configuration.

When Leiningen is invoked, it first reads the project.clj file and applies any active profiles to the resulting project map. (See Leiningen's own readme for a description of how profiles work.) Then it looks up the task which was invoked. Tasks are just functions named after the task they implement and defined in the leiningen.the-task namespace. They usually take a project map as their argument, but can also run outside the context of a project. See the plugin guide for more details on how tasks are written. The apply-task function looks up the task function, checks to make sure it can be applied to the provided arguments, and then calls it.

When you launch Leiningen, it must start an instance of Clojure to load itself. But this instance must not affect the project that you're building. It may use a different version of Clojure or other dependencies from Leiningen itself, and Leiningen's code should not be visible to the project's functions.

Leiningen currently implements this by launching a sub-process using leiningen.core.eval/eval-in-project. Any code that must execute within the context of the project (AOT compilation, test runs, repls) needs to go through this function. Before the process is launched, the project must be "prepped", which consists of running all the tasks named in the project's :prep-tasks key. This defaults to javac and compile, but defproject or profiles may add additional tasks as necessary. All prep tasks must be cheap to call if nothing has changed since their last invocation.

The sub-process (referred to as the "project JVM") is an entirely new invocation of the java command with its own classpath calculated from functions in the leiningen.core.classpath namespace. It can even use a different version of the JVM from Leiningen if the :java-cmd key is provided. It can only communicate with Leiningen's process via the file system, sockets, and its exit code.

The exception to this rule is when :eval-in-leiningen in project.clj is true, as is commonly used for Leiningen plugins. Since Leiningen plugins are intended to be used inside Leiningen itself, there's no need to enforce this isolation.

Copyright © 2011-2017 Phil Hagelberg and contributors.

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License, the same as Clojure.