Portable Clojure development environment

💼 Contents

The Dockerfile in this repository allows building an OCI image usable as a portable development environment based on the official Clojure image tagged tools-deps-bookworm. The produced image contains, apart from the Clojure CLI, the following manually added utilities:

• Emacs

• Prelude configuration for Emacs

• CIDER for Clojure development in Emacs (because, somehow, Prelude does not install it by default, contrary to what is written in its docs)

• Local mirrors of the following package archives for Emacs:

  • GNU ELPA
  • Org mode ELPA
  • MELPA

  maintained by d12frosted and as instructed by ninrod.

• some command-line utilities like

  • Starship prompt
  • tree for recursive directory listings
  • HTTPie for HTTP API testing
  • jq for JSON processing
  • figlet for making ASCII art
  • lolcat for rainbow colouring text (accessible under /usr/games/lolcat)

• deps-new, a Clojure tool for handily creating projects

This repository arose from a need to be able to play and experiment with Clojure and functional programming in general in environments that are behind a corporate firewall and thus make downloading artifacts and installing executables difficult or at the very least unpleasant.

Warning

The produced image is by no means minimal and it is not designed to be. On the contrary, a handful of development tools deemed useful are installed to make for a more enjoyable developer experience. This, and above all the local versions of the Emacs package archives, leads to a large image size, currently around 3.5 GB.

❗️ Prerequisites

The only prerequisite is a container platform like Docker or Podman.

💡 Usage

The following are instructions for novices.

Get contents

Clone this repository using Git

git clone https://github.com/tdinev/clojure-container-ide.git

or download and extract the ZIP archive.

Build local image

Build the OCI image:

docker build -t clojure-ide clojure-container-ide

clojure-ide denotes the name of the image, its tag is latest (since no tag has explicitly been specified), and clojure-container-ide is the name of the directory containing the contents of this repository.

This step may take some time (probably up to two minutes) as several packages need to be downloaded.

Start a container

Spin off a container in interactive mode:

docker run -it --name clojure-dev clojure-ide

The container will be called clojure-dev in this case.

Use the container

You are now in a bash environment. You can play around with the Clojure REPL:

clojure

(You can exit the REPL by sending the EOF character, usually by typing CTRL+D or CTRL+Z.)

or you can create a new application using deps-new:

clojure -Tnew app :name tdinev/demo

Interacting (via Git Bash on Windows) looks like this:

Stopping the container

You can exit the container from within by typing

exit

in the shell.

Resuming the container

If the container is exited, you can resume it to avoid the somewhat long waiting time when creating a new one

docker container start clojure-dev
docker attach clojure-dev

Deploying commands as root

If you want to spawn off a bash as root in a running container (e.g., to install further packages), you can use

docker exec -it -u root clojure-dev bash

provided the container name is clojure-dev.