clojure

tools.deps.alpha

Clojure2018–2021

clojure / tools.deps.alpha · Archived

tools.deps.alpha

A functional API for transitive dependency graph expansion and the creation of classpaths

Languages & Compilers

Explore on GitHub Read Hacker News discussions

11Distinct people

12Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

434GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A functional API for transitive dependency graph expansion and the creation of classpaths

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year12 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-08-09 15:31:33 UTC to 2021-07-21 07:02:07 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	4	4
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	6	6
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

12 sources

john-shaffer·Jul 21, 2021

That appears to have been true for only about a month: https://groups.google.com/g/clojure/c/WI3ddZRK4Bg/m/RtJVt3IZ... https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha/commit/c22ad46c6...

In Clojure builds as an amalgamation of orthogonal parts

onetom·Jun 5, 2020

> In absence of an official answer, ... Wouldn't you consider this and official answer?: https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha#rationale

In A History of Clojure [pdf]

cmiles74·May 13, 2020

Neither is clj, for some reason, and it installs the same way as Leiningen. ;-) From their website: "Then run: Invoke-Expression (New-Object System.Net.WebClient) .DownloadString('https://download.clojure.org/install/win-install-1.10.1.536.... There's also no clj installer for Windows although there is a Scoop package. https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha/wiki/clj-on-Wind...

In Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

pjc50·May 13, 2020

Of course, that's not the official instructions. These are the official instructions: https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha/wiki/clj-on-Wind... - they've managed to work out what the powershell is for "run untrusted shell script directly from HTTPs". What there should be is an exe or MSI installer like every other Windows program.

In Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

didibus·Mar 2, 2020

This is being addressed currently. There is now a bundled into the Clojure distribution package manager called "tools.deps". It currently have alpha support for Windows. They are still ironing out the quirks: https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha/wiki/clj-on-Wind... You no longer need local Maven repo, because tools.deps supports local dependencies, you can basically just depend on local folders. It also can depend on git repos.

In Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread

svnpenn·Mar 1, 2020

The situation with windows is weird. You have to run a powershell script to install. They should just offer a Zip or Exe like every other programming language. https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha/wiki/clj-on-Wind...

In Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread

int_19h·Feb 22, 2020

Is Clojure ever going to treat Windows as a first-class platform? https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha/wiki/clj-on-Wind... "Currently, clj on Windows is in an alpha state."

In State of Clojure 2020

puredanger·Jul 5, 2019

Build tools like lein or Maven attempt to build a "declarative" definition of a project and then apply a set of plugins to that model using an implicit lifecycle. In reality, simple projects don't need that complexity and complicated projects only match 80% to either the lifecycle or the plugins available, so you end up wedging imperative things onto the build, hunting down obscure plugins, or hacking your own. Other build tools (like boot, or even Ant) acknowledge that builds are actually programs built from similar tasks. deps was designed to find a sweet spot in the middle of this with deps defined as data, aliases capturing program executions as data, but builds as programs. As such, the scope is drastically narrowed in deps to just a) building classpaths (by resolving dependency graphs) and b) launching programs. As such, this tends

Read the rest

to be a dramatically simpler model to start with (your initial deps.edn can be empty), and a model that is easy to understand as you scale up. I think there is more to do in how we model "tools" (esp tools shared across projects) and program composites, but nothing prevents you from building these yourself if needed (as you have the full power of Clojure at your disposal). You can find a pretty comprehensive list of deps.edn tools at https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha/wiki/Tools

In Clojure and Deps.edn: A basic guide

twoquestions·May 30, 2019

The 'Try it online' link on ClojureScript's Github page is broken, not sure if that service is still online. https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript The Tools page under ClojureScript site doesn't mention Sublime Text 3 or VS Code at all (in typing this I realize Emacs would probably be the most common editor while working with a lisp like Clojure...). https://clojurescript.org/tools/repls LightTable hasn't been updated in forever, but they're cognizant of that and are working on it. Clojure on Windows is apparently still in alpha state. Out of curiosity, do you work on Mac or Linux? https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha/wiki/clj-on-Wind... The repl.it Clojure instance is very old, but that's not unique to Clojure. Clojure looks to be a very good language, and I enjoyed playing with it a few years ago, and I understand it's improv

Read the rest

ed a lot since then, especially in error handling, which is why I bounced off back then. I was just worried it was more like Objective-C (an apparently declining language with a clear successor) than Rust (a small but passionate community). Good to hear it's still going strong!

In Show HN: Easy intro book to Clojure and immutability

didibus·Apr 23, 2019

No it doesn't. It depends on nRepl. Personally, I find maven repos and lein to be one of the better dependency/build ecosystem of any language. So I disagree with your premise. But, if you don't like them, there's a lot of alternatives. For dependency management, there's now an official one, maintained and bundled with Clojure, called `tools.deps`. It supports multiple providers, currently maven repos, git repos and local folders. For build tasks, appart from Lein, you can use Boot or Gradle. But there's a new trend now to rely on individual Clojure programs as the foundation for build tasks, which are then packaged and distributed through `tools.deps`. You can see their full list here: https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha/wiki/Tools In the ClojureScript world, there are less build options, but `shadow-cljs` has emerged as a replac

Read the rest

ement for Lein, and gained a lot of popularity, because it integrates transparently with npm.

In Why did Clojure gain so much popularity?

based2·Jan 2, 2019

https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha

In [ANN] tools.deps.alpha 0.6.474 and clj 1.10.0.408

shaunparker·Aug 9, 2018

I don't find that too surprising, Rich tends to let things bake internally (in his head and at Cognitect) for a while before releasing anything publicly for consumption and feedback. Most of Clojure's current development is around tooling [1] and some changes to move clojure.spec out of alpha. I believe they want to accomplish this for 1.10, but I'm not sure where I remember hearing that. Alex Miller has mentioned that Cognitect built and continues to work on a tool that tracks all of your functions with spec definitions and generatively tests them only when the function or one of its dependencies changes. This would be extremely helpful since generative testing can be expensive to run, especially if you want to generate huge amounts of test cases. It'd be nice to say "test all of my codebase's functions 10 million times" and then have th

Read the rest

at information stored locally with the code. In Rich's "Effective Programs" talk [2] he outlines the "10x problems" that Clojure was targeted at solving. In it there are two 10x problems that weren't solved by Clojure: resource utilization and libraries. There's not much Clojure can do to solve resource utilization as it's dependent on the host (JVM), but the library problem (especially Clojure libraries with spec definitions) is solvable (though there seems to be some disagreement on whether only allowing growth in libraries in a practical). Pure speculation: All of their tooling projects (spec, codec, tool.deps, and the above mentioned generative test runner/tracker) are going to come together in a tool that attempts solves the library dependency problem. Rich outlines a lot of his thinking about how to accomplish this in his "Spec-ulation" talk [3]. He wants Clojure to "become the first community to make [dependencies] great". I hope that we'll see more tools and guidance from the Clojure team on this soon (and maybe improved out-of-the-box error messages)! [1] https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha [2] https://youtu.be/2V1FtfBDsLU?t=29m53s [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGkS5ICk

In Problem Solving and Clojure 1.9 with Rich Hickey