Cambada

Cambada is a packager for Clojure based on deps.edn (AKA tools.deps). It is heavily inspired by Leiningen's jar and uberjar tasks and also supports GraalVM's new native-image making it a one-stop shop for any packaging needed for your Clojure project.

Motivation

Leiningen has laid the foundations of what many of us have come to accept as the standard for Clojure projects. Clojure's tools.deps potentially brings new ideas to the Clojure workflow. Cambada brings some of the great features of Leiningen to the tools.deps workflow.

Cambada's sole focus is packaging. It doesn't have plugins, templates or Clojars integration. It packages your deps.edn progject as one - or all - of:

1. jar
2. uberjar
3. GraalVM native image

On top of Phil Hagelberg's (and so many others') great Leiningen, many thanks to Dominic Monroe and his work on pack as well as Taylor Wood and his clj.native-image. These projects offered a lot of inspiration (and, in some cases, donor code too).

Table of Contents

• Getting Started
• Easy Aliases
• Packaging as a Jar
• Packaging as an Uberjar
• Packaging as a Native Image
• Caveats
• Performance Comparison
• Bugs
• Help!

Getting Started

Cambada is a simple set of main functions that can be called from a deps.edn alias. The simplest way to have it available in your project is to add an alias with extra-deps to your deps.edn file:

{:aliases {:cambada
           {:extra-deps
            {luchiniatwork/cambada
             {:mvn/version "1.0.4"}}}}}

Cambada has three main entry points, cambada.jar, cambada.uberjar and cambada.native-image. Let's say you simply want to create an uberjar:

$ clj -R:cambada -m cambada.uberjar
Cleaning target
Creating target/classes
  Compiling ...
Creating target/project-name-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
Updating pom.xml
Creating target/project-name-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar
  Including ...
Done!

Your files will be located at target/ by default.

All entry points have a few extra configuration options you might be interested in. For instance:

$ clj -R:cambada -m cambada.uberjar --help
Package up the project files and all dependencies into a jar file.

Usage: clj -m cambada.uberjar [options]

Options:
  -m, --main NS_NAME                            The namespace with the -main function
      --app-group-id STRING     project-name    Application Maven group ID
      --app-artifact-id STRING  project-name    Application Maven artifact ID
      --app-version STRING      1.0.0-SNAPSHOT  Application version
      --[no-]copy-source                        Copy source files by default
  -a, --aot NS_NAMES            all             Namespaces to be AOT-compiled or `all` (default)
  -d, --deps FILE_PATH          deps.edn        Location of deps.edn file
  -o, --out PATH                target          Output directory
  -h, --help                                    Shows this help

Do try --help for cambada.jar and cambada.native-image if you are interested or refer to the sections below.

Easy Aliases

One of the powers-in-simplicity of tools.deps is the ability to define aliases on deps.edn. When we used the alias cambada on the section above, we simply specified it as an dependency to be resolved (therefore the -R when calling clj).

You can also be a lot more prescriptive in your aliases by making them do more work for you. For instance, the alias below will create a versioned uberjar:

{:aliases {:uberjar
           {:extra-deps
            {luchiniatwork/cambada {:mvn/version "1.0.0"}}
            :main-opts ["-m" "cambada.uberjar"
                        "--app-version" "0.5.3"]}}}

By having an alias like this uberjar one in your deps.edn you can simply run it by using $ clj -A:uberjar making it very familiar to those used with $ lein uberjar:

$ clj -A:uberjar
Cleaning target
Creating target/classes
  Compiling ...
Creating target/project-name-0.5.3.jar
Updating pom.xml
Creating target/project-name-0.5.3-standalone.jar
  Including ...
Done!

Packaging as a Jar

Let's start with an empty project folder:

$ mkdir -p myproj/src/myproj/
$ cd myproj

Create a deps.edn at the root of your project with cambada.jar as an alias:

{:aliases {:jar
           {:extra-deps
            {luchiniatwork/cambada {:mvn/version "1.0.2"}}
            :main-opts ["-m" "cambada.jar"
                        "-m" "myproj.core"]}}}

Create a simple hello world on a -main function at src/myproj/core.clj:

(ns myproj.core
  (:gen-class))

(defn -main [& args]
  (println "Hello World!"))

Of course, just for safe measure, let's run this hello world via clj:

$ clj -m myproj.core
Hello World!

Then just call the alias from the project's root:

$ clj -A:jar
Cleaning target
Creating target/classes
  Compiling myproj.core
Creating target/myproj-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
Updating pom.xml
Done!

Once Cambada is done, you'll have a jar package at target/. In order to run it, you'll need to add Clojure and spec to your class path. The paths will vary on your system:

$ java -cp target/myproj-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar myproj.core
Hello World!

For a standalone jar file see the uberjar option on the next section.

You can specify the following options for cambada.jar:

  -m, --main NS_NAME                            The namespace with the -main function
      --app-group-id STRING     project-name    Application Maven group ID
      --app-artifact-id STRING  project-name    Application Maven artifact ID
      --app-version STRING      1.0.0-SNAPSHOT  Application version
      --[no-]copy-source                        Copy source files by default
  -a, --aot NS_NAMES            all             Namespaces to be AOT-compiled or `all` (default)
  -d, --deps FILE_PATH          deps.edn        Location of deps.edn file
  -o, --out PATH                target          Output directory
  -h, --help                                    Shows this help

These options should be quite self-explanatory and the defaults are hopefully sensible enough for most of the basic cases. By default everything gets AOT-compiled and sources are copied to the resulting jar.

For those used to Leiningen, the application's group ID, artifact ID and version are not extracted from project.clj (since it's assumed you don't have a project.clj in a deps.edn workflow). Therefore, you must specify these expressively as options.

Packaging as an Uberjar

Let's start with an empty project folder:

$ mkdir -p myproj/src/myproj/
$ cd myproj

Create a deps.edn at the root of your project with cambada.jar as an alias:

{:aliases {:uberjar
           {:extra-deps
            {luchiniatwork/cambada {:mvn/version "1.0.0"}}
            :main-opts ["-m" "cambada.uberjar"
                        "-m" "myproj.core"]}}}

Create a simple hello world on a -main function at src/myproj/core.clj:

(ns myproj.core
  (:gen-class))

(defn -main [& args]
  (println "Hello World!"))

Of course, just for safe measure, let's run this hello world via clj:

$ clj -m myproj.core
Hello World!

Then just call the alias from the project's root:

$ clj -A:uberjar
Cleaning target
Creating target/classes
  Compiling myproj.core
Creating target/myproj-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
Updating pom.xml
Creating target/myproj-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar
  Including myproj-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
  Including clojure-1.9.0.jar
  Including spec.alpha-0.1.143.jar
  Including core.specs.alpha-0.1.24.jar
Done!

Once Cambada is done, you'll have two jar packages at target/. One for a basic jar and one standalone with all dependencies in it. In order to run it, simply call it:

$ java -jar target/myproj-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar
Hello World!

cambada.uberjar has exactly the same options and defaults as cambada.jar (see above for more details).

Caveats

If any of your transitive dependencies has a Maven Central dependency, cambada may fail on you (investigations under way). Therefore, it is recommended that you explicitly add your repos (Central included) to your deps.edn file i.e.:

{:deps {...}

 :mvn/repos {"central" {:url "https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/"}
             "clojars" {:url "https://repo.clojars.org/"}}}

Packaging as a Native Image

By using GraalVM we now have the option of packaging everything AOT compiled as a native image.

If you want to use this feature, make sure to download and install GraalVM.

If you are a MacOS user, GraalVM CE is available as a brew cask:

$ brew cask install graalvm/tap/graalvm-ce

GraalVM's native-image is a package that needs to be installed manually with the following command (attention that gu is at $GRAALVM_HOME/bin/ if it is not on your PATH):

$ gu install native-image

You will need to set your GRAALVM_HOME environment variable to point to where GraalVM is installed. Alternatevely you can call cambada.native-image with the argument --graalvm-home pointing to it.

The entry point for native image packaging is cambada.native-image. Let's assume your GRAALVM_HOME variable is set (if you don't, use --graalvm-home).

Let's start with an empty project folder:

$ mkdir -p myproj/src/myproj/
$ cd myproj

Create a deps.edn at the root of your project with cambada.jar as an alias:

{:aliases {:native-image
           {:extra-deps
            {luchiniatwork/cambada {:mvn/version "1.0.0"}}
            :main-opts ["-m" "cambada.native-image"
                        "-m" "myproj.core"]}}}

Create a simple hello world on a -main function at src/myproj/core.clj:

(ns myproj.core
  (:gen-class))

(defn -main [& args]
  (println "Hello World!"))

Of course, just for safe measure, let's run this hello world via clj:

$ clj -m myproj.native-image
Hello World!

Then just call the alias from the project's root:

$ clj -A:native-image
Cleaning target
Creating target/classes
  Compiling myproj.core
Creating target/myproj
   classlist:   2,810.07 ms
       (cap):   1,469.31 ms
       setup:   2,561.28 ms
  (typeflow):   5,802.45 ms
   (objects):   2,644.17 ms
  (features):      40.54 ms
    analysis:   8,609.18 ms
    universe:     314.28 ms
     (parse):   1,834.84 ms
    (inline):   2,338.45 ms
   (compile):  16,824.24 ms
     compile:  21,435.77 ms
       image:   1,862.44 ms
       write:   1,276.55 ms
     [total]:  38,942.48 ms

Done!

Once Cambada is done, you'll have an executable package at target/:

$ ./target/myproj
Hello World!

Extra options can be sent to GraalVM's packager by using Cambada's --graalvm-opt option i.e., to include FILE as a resource, simply use --graalvm-opt H:IncludeResources=FILE.

Performance Comparison

A quick comparison of the myproj hello world as described previously and ran across different packaging options:

Straight with clj:

$ time clj -m myproj.core
Hello World!
1.160 secs

As a standalone uberjar:

$ time java -jar target/myproj-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar
Hello World!
0.850 secs

As a native image:

$ time ./target/myproj
Hello World!
0.054 secs

Comparing with clj as a baseline:

Method	Speed in secs	Speed relative to clj
clj	1.160 secs	1x
uberjar	0.850 secs	1.36x
native-image	0.054 secs	21.48x

Bugs

If you find a bug, submit a Github issue.

Help

This project is looking for team members who can help this project succeed! If you are interested in becoming a team member please open an issue.

License

Copyright © 2018 Tiago Luchini

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE