Repeatability

Leiningen is a tool designed around project automation. But without repeatability, automation is worthless.

You can think of a build as a function of the current state of the project, with the repositories referenced by the project's configuration serving as its lexical environment. The return value is the output, exit code, and artifact files produced.

Anything that increases the chance of the build behaving differently on different machines is repeatability poison and should be eliminated. Here are a few of the most common offenders.

User-level Repositories

If you were after repeatability above all else, you would want each build to fetch all its dependencies from the repositories configured in project.clj every time. However, this is too slow to be practical, so dependencies get cached in the local repository inside ~/.m2/.

One common problem is to check in configuration that accidentally depends upon the local repository on your own machine; perhaps you pulled in a dependency X from a third-party repo like Sonatype while working on project A and then declared X as a dependency of project B without adding Sonatype to project B's repository list. As soon as someone tries working on project B on another machine that hasn't had its local repo primed the same way it will fail.

Free-Floating Jars

It may be desirable to add dependencies on jars which haven't been published to any repository. While it's possible to install them locally with things like lein-localrepo, doing so adds the requirement of a manual step to your build, which is counter to our goals of repeatability and automation. It may be acceptable if you are working on a project in isolation rather than on a team, but in most cases it's best to get it into a repository.

If the code is public, you should open a bug report with upstream to get them to publish it in a public repository like Clojars, Sonatype, or Maven Central, depending on the project. If they are resistant or too slow it's always possible to publish "Clojars forks"; see lein help deploying for further details there.

Private jars are similar; if your company has an internal Nexus or Archiva server that's a natural place for them. If you'd like something simpler you can host them on a private S3 bucket.

Snapshot Versions

Sometimes it's necessary to include a dependency on software that hasn't been released yet; details on snapshots can be found in lein help tutorial. Snapshots are by definition non-deterministic, and for this reason Leiningen will only allow you to depend upon snapshots if your project's version is itself a snapshot.

If you need to make a release and the fix you need hasn't made it into a release of your dependency, you can lock to a timestamped snapshot to avoid the repeatability issues. You can find the timestamps for the snapshots by looking inside your local repo:

$ ls ~/.m2/repository/slamhound/slamhound/1.1.0-SNAPSHOT/*jar
slamhound-1.1.0-20110417.030036-2.jar
slamhound-1.1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar

So now you can replace [slamhound "1.1.0-SNAPSHOT"] with [slamhound "1.1.0-20110417.030036-2"] inside project.clj.

Version Ranges

Version ranges that include versions that haven't been released yet suffer from the same repeatability issues as snapshots. Ranges that only cover versions that already exist don't have this problem, but they do prevent the build from ever working with future versions. Leiningen will simply refuse to resolve dependency sets that involve non-overlapping version ranges, so unless you know for a fact that your project will not work with any future versions of a dependency you should absolutely avoid ranges.

Testing

There's been plenty written about nondeterministic tests, and much of it is not specific to any runtime or language. The key is to ensure that state from past test runs or development isn't left around to interfere with future runs. The best way to do this from Clojure is to take advantage of clojure.test/use-fixtures to clear out things like directories on disk used for tempfiles, database tables, or in-memory refs/atoms.

(use-fixtures :each (fn [f]
                      (delete-file-recursively
                       (file "test_projects" "sample" "classes") :silently)
                      (f)))

Detecting Non-Repeatability

Non-repeatability usually makes itself known over time, but usually at the most inopportune or embarrassing moment. You can save a lot of headache by proactively detecting it with a bit of continuous integration infrastructure. The most common tools for this are Jenkins and Travis, the latter being currently suitable only for open source projects. Travis will run your tests after every commit in a completely fresh environment, which helps a lot with dependency issues; the local ~/.m2/repository cache is rebuilt afresh every time. With Jenkins you can do that yourself; a cron job that clears out the local repository every day is probably