Clojure and Atom Editor Setup

Published in

Lemmings

5 min readJun 25, 2017

While Clojure enjoys excellent support from all popular text editors and IDEs this setup guide focuses on Atom Editor.

1) Installing Atom

Atom is a powerful yet lightweight text editor and development environment available for various operating systems like macOs, Windows and Linux.

In addition to Clojure it comes with great support for various other programming languages like JavaScript, Python, Ruby and many more.

https://atom.io

Further reading & watching

2) Installing Atom Packages for Clojure

Next we will install a few packages that give Atom some Clojure super powers. Simply go to Atom > Preferences > + Install and search for the “lemmings” package (assembled by Martin Schurrer) which includes all the packages listed below.

proto-repl
A powerful Clojure REPL with auto-completion, docstrings and more
proto-repl-charts
Enables proto-repl to draw graphs to help visualize data
proto-repl-sayid
Adds proto-repl support for the Clojure debugger Sayid
ink
Used by Proto REPL to display the output of your REPL next to your code
parinfer
Automatically balancing parentheses in your code based on indention

3) Installing VirtualBox

Since we’d like to have a consistent development experience across all platforms we will use a recent version of Ubuntu within a virtual machine.

VirtualBox is an open source tool for managing virtual machines.

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

4) Installing Vagrant

Next we’ll install Vagrant which is a very useful tool that can configure and automatically set up virtual machines for us.

https://www.vagrantup.com

5) Clojure

Last but not least we will download a Vagrant configuration for our Clojure development environment on Ubuntu so we can get started.

https://github.com/lemmings-io/clojure

Click on Clone or download.

Finale: Tying everything together

Use your terminal (on Windows use Git BASH https://git-for-windows.github.io/) to navigate to the directory that you just downloaded.

Next we can provision our development environment with vagrant up

If you do this for the first time this can take a while since Vagrant is downloading a recent version of Ubuntu and setting everything up for you. Perfect time to grab a cup of tea.

Once vagrant up is finished setting everything up there will be a running virtual machine waiting for you.

You can log into the virtual machine using vagrant ssh

Notice how the command line prompt changed its color to green. You are now within your Ubuntu virtual machine.

We can verify this by typing uname -a

Just for fun we can now start a Clojure REPL using lein repl

If you issue lein repl for the first time it can also take a little while.

Above we have evaluated (+ 1 2 3 4) to 10 in our Clojure REPL. Yay.
Once you’ve finished playing around with the Clojure REPL you can exit it using the keyboard combination CTRL+d

Now we are back at the command line prompt of our Ubuntu virtual machine. To log out of the virtual machine to get back to your host system
you can also use CTRL+d

We’re logged out now. Back in our host system.

We could log back in using vagrant ssh or shut down our virtual machine to free up resources for our host system using vagrant halt

If you type vagrant up you start our virtual machine again. This should now happen way faster compared to the first time since Vagrant doesn’t have to set up everything from scratch anymore.

Like a few minutes ago vagrant ssh gets you back into the virtual machine.

Now we will again start a Clojure REPL using lein but unlike last time we won’t work with the REPL within the terminal and instead start a headless REPL that we then can connect to from outside of the virtual machine.

lein repl :headless :host 0.0.0.0 :port 7888

Now we’ll connect Atom to our headless REPL within our virtual machine.
Open Atom and navigate to Packages > Command Palette > Toggle