A good development environment if fundamental to being productive. This is especially true for Lisps. A good environment can greatly speed up your development process and allow you to utilize the full power of Clojure or any other Lisp.

This tutorial is focused on a ClojureScript environment for a Leiningen based project being developed in Emacs.

Why Emacs?

Emacs has a great setup for most programming languages but really shines when it comes to Lisps, including Clojure. Cider is the powerful package that allows easy interaction with the Clojure REPL and many IDE like features. In combination with clj-refactor, you get one of the most powerful toolkits out there.

Why Leiningen?

Leiningen is still the most widely used way to run Clojure applications. I also prefer the data driven approach to managing configurations that Leiningen take.

Why is This Guide Needed?

If you have a Clojure project, you can just run cider-jack-in and you are ready to go. That is not the case with ClojureScript. A few extra tweaks are required to get everything running smoothly.

Setting up ClojureScript With Cider

The first thing you need is to include two packages and setup a new nreple-middleware. I always put these configurations into my dev profile. because they are not needed in production.

You will need to add the following to your project.clj:

:profiles
{:dev {:dependencies [[com.cemerick/piggieback "0.2.1"]
                      [figwheel-sidecar "0.5.0-2"]]
       :repl-options {:nrepl-middleware [cemerick.piggieback/wrap-cljs-repl]}}}

With your project.clj updated, you can to run cider-jack-in-clojurescript (C-c M-J) to start up your clojurescript REPL.

Inside the new REPL session, you can start Figwheel with:

(use 'fighweel-sidecar.repl-api)
(start-figwheel!)
(cljs-repl)

These commands will start up a new ClojureScript REPL. You now have two REPL session running. One for Clojure and one for ClojureScript.

The above is a nice way to get started but gets tedious very quickly, took me two start-ups took 2 start-ups. Therefore I recommend you add the following to your Emacs config:

(setq cider-cljs-lein-repl "(do (use 'figwheel-sidecar.repl-api) (start-figwheel!) (cljs-repl))")

As you can see this is just a wrapper for the commands you were running by hand. Now, every time you execute cider-jack-in-clojurescript, these commands are run and you will have your two REPLs setup.

Other Options

If you are using boot or any other setup, please take a look at the great Cider documentation on this topic. It covers everything here and more.