It just always felt like I was running into things that felt basic and the docs didn't have an answer for them. I would see so many elaborate deps.edn files in people's configs and when I tried to look up how they worked I couldn't find anything.
That depends how you define your build targets (called aliases) in deps.edn. And there is also -T to call (public) functions in a namespace (file/program), e.g. when using build.clj - that's for building your jar.
-X calls a function that you can define using :exec-fn, :exec-args has it's arguments (usually a map) -M calls the main function ('executes a program', if you will), it's 'normal' (command-line) arguments are passed using :main-opts
And btw. `clj` is just a wrapper around `clojure` that runs `clojure` in rlwrap. No need to use this if you do not use the REPL.
Here is a (big) template I've just finished yesterday: deps.edn: https://github.com/Release-Candidate/Clojure-Template/blob/m...
and it's usage: https://github.com/Release-Candidate/Clojure-Template#build-...
build.clj - build a jar and run mkdocs https://github.com/Release-Candidate/Clojure-Template/blob/m...
My new project deps file is always literally "{}". I love that that's all I need to do to start doing stuff. I add a couple libraries as needed. Maybe at some point an alias or two.
In particular cloning their clojure-deps-edn [2] as my ~/.clojure folder gives me ready made aliases for different kinds of repls, tools like reveal etc.
This, plus polylith [3] architecture has finally allowed me to start working in clojure and not get lost in configuration confusion.
[1] https://practical.li/clojure/clojure-cli/projects/add-librar...
> The issue I personally found is that I needed to look at a bunch of OS project's deps.edn to see how people commonly structure things. Other than that it is a simple tool.
This seems like a contradiction, because if it was well documented you wouldn’t need to look at other people’s configs to see how to use it.
My experience with deps.edn is that every time I start a project and make a deps.edn file, I immediately draw a blank and don’t know how to structure it, so I open ones from other projects to start lifting stuff out of them.
I still don’t know how to reliably configure a project to use nrepl or socket repl without just using an editor plugin. I definitely have no idea how to use those in conjunction with a tool like reveal.
To me, none of that is simple. Simple would be like Emacs’ use-package. With that I know how to add dependencies, specify keybinds, and do initialization and configuration off the top of my head. And it has really nice documentation with tons of examples.
https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package