Start up to / stop down to

In many cases, calling just (mount/start) or (mount/stop) is enough. But there may be circumstances, for instance in your tests, that you don't want to start all of your global states.

The start and stop functions can take one optional argument, a var. The var points to a defstate that should be started (or stopped), including all its dependencies (or dependents). It allows you to easily start or stop only a part of your application.

Note that the default behaviour is that the dependencies are calculated based on the sequence of available defstates as registered in mount-lite. In effect, it might start (or stop) a bit more than the given defstate really depends on. If you need more graph-like behaviour, have a look at the [[mount.extensions.explicit-deps]] and [[namespace deps]] extensions.

This "up-to" behaviour is unique to mount-lite. There used to be other options to influence what is started or stopped, but those turned out to anti-patterns and were rarely used. If you need more options though, have a look at the extension point section.

An example:

(defstate a :start nil)
(defstate b :start nil)
(defstate c :start nil)

(start #'b)
;=> (#'user/a #'user/b)

(start)
;=> (#'user/c)

(stop #'b)
;=> (#'user/c #'user/b)