What's the difference between Leiningen and Clojure CLI tools and how should I use them?

Question

I'm playing around with Clojure recently. The most loved dependency management tool in the Clojure ecosystem is Leiningen to my knowledge. But I also found Clojure has provided CLI tools which probably could replace Leiningen. Due to the limitation of experience in Clojure, I do not quite understand the difference between Leiningen and those CLI tools. I heard those CLI tools is much lightweight, what does it mean? How should I use them?

Answer 1

CLI tools are more limited in scope than Leiningen - it's a small tool which you can use to launch a REPL quickly. Combined with tools.deps.alpha it can be used to run code and pull in 3rd party dependencies. You can read more about it here .

Leiningen can do all of that, plus:

• create deployment artifacts (uberjars)
• start a REPL server or connect to a running one
• manage mixed projects (for example Clojure + Java or Clojure + Clojurescript)
• run arbitrary tasks in your project
• manage dependencies
• plugin support (linters, deployment tools)
• integrate with Maven

The Lein repository includes a sample project file, sample.project.clj , which is a bit overwhelming but shows all the things Lein can do.

At this point, Lein is more useful for building applications and libraries - as it has all the features you might need to do that. That said, CLI tools + tools.deps is quickly gaining traction and there are projects which add all the missing bits from Leiningen, but you have to combine them yourself.