Installation

nREPL is compatible with Clojure 1.7.0+ and Java 8+.

nREPL is a library (as opposed to it being an application), so it’s not something you’d be installing in the traditional sense. There’s currently no nREPL binary or script that you can run to spin a server.

While there’s no binary, there is a command-line interface that mostly targets clj. It’s documented in the subsequent sections of this manual.

All popular Clojure build tools (Leiningen, Gradle, Maven) have the ability to run an nREPL server and most of the time you’ll probably simply use nREPL through them and end up using whatever nREPL version they happen to ship.

Still, from time to time you’ll be building a tool around nREPL or you’ll want to embed an nREPL server directly in your application. In those scenarios some kind of an installation will be in order - just adding nREPL as a dependency to your project.

nREPL is available in Clojars. Add this to your Leiningen project.clj :dependencies:

[nrepl "1.3.0"]

You can override the version of nREPL supplied by Leiningen by adding nREPL as a dependency to your project.

Or, add this to your Gradle project’s build.gradle:

dependencies {
  // to use as a library in your code
  implementation 'nrepl:nrepl:1.3.0'

  // or to override the version of nREPL used by the clojureRepl task
  nrepl 'nrepl:nrepl:1.3.0'
}

Or, add this to your Maven project’s pom.xml:

<dependency>
  <groupId>nrepl</groupId>
  <artifactId>nrepl</artifactId>
  <version>1.3.0</version>
</dependency>

Enable libnrepl JVMTI agent

Starting with Java 20, the previously deprecated Thread.stop method has been disabled. This change made it impossible for the interrupt middleware to forcibly stop evaluation of forms which don’t respond to the officially endorsed Thread.interrupt calls. In response, nREPL introduced a native JVMTI-based agent to be able to stop threads on the latest Java again.

nREPL ships with prebuilt JVMTI agent binaries for the following platforms:

  • Linux: x64 and arm64

  • MacOS: x64/arm64 (universal binary)

Other platforms and architectures not in this list are still supported by nREPL. Only the thread stopping capability and only on Java 20+ will not work there, the rest of nREPL functionality will still work as always.

For the JVMTI agent to be able to attach to the running process, the JVM has to be started with the flag -Djdk.attach.allowAttachSelf. Depending on the build tool, this can be done like this:

  • With tools.deps, add :jvm-opts ["-Djdk.attach.allowAttachSelf"] to an alias in deps.edn and enable that alias, or add -J-Djdk.attach.allowAttachSelf explicitly to your REPL command.

  • With Leiningen, add :jvm-opts ["-Djdk.attach.allowAttachSelf"] to project.clj.

If -Djdk.attach.allowAttachSelf is not enabled, nREPL will not try to load the native agent and will not try to stop threads on Java 20 and newer if the regular Thread.interrupt() does not succeed.

You can explicitly disable the JVMTI agent so that it does not load even with -Djdk.attach.allowAttachSelf enabled. To do that, add this line to nREPL config:

 :enable-jvmti-agent false
Prior to Java 20, nREPL will not try to load libnrepl native agent regardless of the state of -Djdk.attach.allowAttachSelf flag or :enable-jvmti-agent configuration option, and will use Thread.stop() to interrupt the evaluating thread.