Demo of using ClojureScript + tools-deps + CIDER

These are just notes following a helpful video by Arne Brasseur: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcFx-QL5ySM&feature=youtu.be

I’ve been trying to get into ClojureScript but almost gave up when I couldn’t figure out how to work with tools-deps and CIDER (which is my usual setup for Clojure projects). Very grateful he posted the video, check it out!

Sanity checks

Try it outside of Emacs first. Install Clojure CLI tools from clojure.org.

I used Emacs 26.1 with CIDER 0.18.0, Java 8 and Clojure 1.9.0.

Plain figwheel-main + deps.edn

clojure -A:dev -m figwheel.main --compile cljs-deps-figwheel-main-cider.core --repl

This should launch:

address http://localhost:9500 in your default browser with the Figwheel page open and any code in core.cljs executed
a browser-connected REPL where you can evaluate things like (js/alert "does it work?")

Warning: js/alert will block the REPL until you click “ok” in the browser!

Using a build file

clojure -A:dev -m figwheel.main --build mybuild --repl

This should do the same as the above. mybuild corresponds to ./mybuild.cljs.edn.

Once more with feeling Emacs

Passing arguments manually

N.B. /If you’ve cloned this repo directly, you are effectively skipping this step (which is fine).

Customize CIDER to add "-A:dev" to your CLI tool options (M-x customize-variable cider-clojure-cli-global-options). This is because I’ve put the figwheel stuff in an alias.
M-x cider-jack-in-cljs and when prompted select figwheel-main first then mybuild as your build.
nREPL should fire up and do the same things as the raw command above.

Using .dir-locals.el to save arguments for project

Create ./.dir-locals.el to store the arguments from the previous step. Remember the catch is that you need to close and reopen any buffers visiting files in the project directory because dir-locals is only read when buffers are first opened.

cbowdon/cljs-deps-figwheel-main-cider