Hacking on nREPL

This section is dedicated to people, who’re hacking on nREPL itself (e.g. to fix bugs or to enhance existing functionality).

There are generally two approaches to hacking on nREPL - you can either make some changes, build a new server and run it locally to test your changes (e.g. via clj) or you can hack on nREPL in the classic interactive Lisp manner and just make some changes and test them directly from a running (n)REPL.

Building nREPL

Releases are available from Clojars, and SNAPSHOT builds from master’s HEAD are automatically deployed there as well, so manually building nREPL shouldn’t ever be necessary (unless you’re hacking on it).

Building nREPL locally is a very simple process:

  1. Clone the repo

  2. Make sure you have Leingingen installed

  3. Run the build:

$ lein install

Afterwards you can simply do something like:

$ clj -Sdeps '{:deps {nrepl/nrepl {:mvn/version "1.2.0"}}}' -M -m nrepl.cmdline --interactive

Now you can start playing the server you’ve built.

Building libnrepl native agent

The reason why nREPL needs a native agent is explained here.

Native binaries of libnrepl JVMTI agent are built on CI and then copied into the res/ directory manually, so to do regular nREPL builds you don’t have to recompile native code. However, if you want to experiment with the agent yourself, then you can rebuild the native library for your current platform like this:

$ cd libnrepl/
$ make all

The Makefile will use the default C compiler for your OS (GCC on Linux, Clang on MacOS). You will also need JAVA_HOME environment variable to be pointing at the JDK installation. After the binary is built, copy it from libnrepl/build/ directory into res/ and restart the REPL. The new binary will be picked up automatically.

Interactive Hacking

As nREPL is fundamental to the development workflows of many people it might be unclear how exactly you can hack on it, while at the same time you’re already running an nREPL server, powering the REPL in which you’re doing to hacking.

Developing nREPL while connected to nREPL is a classic example of eating your own dog food.

The development process is actually pretty simple - you just need to connect to nREPL as you’d normally would (e.g. by using CIDER, vim-iced or Calva), make some changes and test them by starting new nREPL instances from the REPL and connecting to them to see how they are having.

In practice it might not be convenient to spin many nREPL connections from your editor, so a combination of nrepl.server/start-server and nrepl.core/connect is a very good alternative.

;; first we have to start a new server
=> (require '[nrepl.server :refer [start-server stop-server]])
nil
=> (def server (start-server :port 7888))
='user/server
=> (require '[nrepl.core :as nrepl])
nil
;; now you can connect to the server and send it some messages
=> (with-open [conn (nrepl/connect :port 7888)]
     (-> (nrepl/client conn 1000)    ; message receive timeout required
         (nrepl/message {:op "eval" :code "(+ 2 3)"})
         nrepl/response-values))
;; when you're done with a server you can stop it
=> (stop-server server)
You don’t really need an nREPL-powered REPL for this workflow. It’s going to work in exactly the same manner regardless of the REPL you’re using.

Task Management

All command line tasks are written in babashka as to maximize compatibility across platforms. Please see babashka for installation instructions.

To get a list of the available tasks (as defined in bb.edn) run:

$ bb tasks

Running the tests

The primary way to run tests is using Kaocha. The following command runs the test suite on latest configured Clojure version:

$ bb kaocha

The following command is useful while actively working on the codebase:

$ bb kaocha --watch --skip-meta :slow

as it will re-run tests on changes, but also skip a handful of slower tests.

Running test for Clojure 1.7 and 1.8

Kaocha only supports Clojure 1.9 and up. For earlier versions, we can still use Leiningen’s test runner. To run the tests only for a specific version of Clojure, use a command like this:

$ lein with-profile 1.8 test

To run tests for all Clojure versions from 1.7 to latest configured.

$ lein test-all

Running tests on CI

For ease of use/consistency with other nREPL projects, tests are ran on CI environments using a babashka, with the command:

$ bb test

this will check the VERSION environmental variable, and switch between Kaocha and Leiningen tests based on which is available.

Running cljfmt

Our CI build enforces consistent indentation in all source files using cljfmt. You can run it locally using:

$ lein with-profile cljfmt cljfmt check

You can have cljfmt fix indentation problems like this:

$ lein with-profile cljfmt cljfmt fix

Running Eastwood

Our CI build enforces some lint checks via Eastwood. You can run it locally using:

$ lein with-profile eastwood eastwood

Regenerating the Built-in Ops Documentation

If you’ve made any changes to the built-in middleware descriptors you can regenerate their documentation using:

$ lein docs