This is a really short guide to get an interactive development environment where ClojureScript code is automatically reloaded in the browser and a command line REPL which evaluates in the browser.

Install Clojure

The easiest way to get Clojure is to install Leiningen which is a project automation tool for Clojure. It is somewhat like a combination of Bundler and Rake in Ruby. Among other things it allows you to:

• Create new projects
• Manage dependencies
• Run tests
• Start a REPL
• Run the project
• Publish libraries to Clojars

• Run tasks

  brew install leiningen
  

Substitute the above for your prefered package manager if you are not using brew.

Create a new project

We are going to use a Lein plugin called Figwheel which gives us a starting point for a ClojureScript application which hot-loads your code in the browser as you make changes. FigWheel includes:

• Live Code Reloading
• Static File Server
• Live CSS Reloading
• A ClojureScript REPL

I’m going to use the Om tutorial as a starting point. Om is an interface to React in ClojureScript.

lein new figwheel om-tut -- --om
cd om-tut

Start the FigWheel static server / autobuilder:

lein figwheel 

The first time the project is compiled it will take a little while since it has to fetch and build dependencies.

You should end up in a REPL which is connected to your ClojureScript application running in the browser. It uses websockets to communicate.

Visit localhost:3449 in your browser and open up the web console.

You should see Edits to this text should show up in your developer console..

Open src/om_tut/core.cljs in your editor and change the string given to the println function. As soon as you save the code in the browser will be reloaded and the new text will be displayed in the console.

Pretty neat!

Now try this, go to the REPL and type (println "Hello from the REPL") and you will see this message in the browser console.

This is a truly interactive environment for ClojureScript and can be used as a basis for developing a declarative web UI.