tkocmathla / lein-parent

A Leiningen plugin for inheriting properties from a parent project

lein-parent

A Leiningen plugin for inheriting properties from a parent project.

This plugin is useful when you have a series of related projects that all share some set of properties and want to avoid duplicating the values across projects. e.g. you have several projects that all share the same Maven private repository information.

lein-parent is the conceptual reverse of lein-sub.

Usage

Put [lein-parent "0.3.3"] into the :plugins vector of your project.clj.

Specify a parent in your project.clj and which properties to inherit from it as follows.

:parent-project {:path "../project.clj"
                 :inherit [:dependencies :repositories [:profiles :dev]]
                 :only-deps [org.clojure/clojure com.stuartsierra/component]}

As of lein-parent 0.3.0 and leiningen 2.7.0, you can also reference a parent project by its lein/maven coords, like this:

:parent-project {:coords [org.foo/clojure-parent-project "1.0.0"]
                 :inherit [:managed-dependencies]}

Inherited properties may be either keywords or sequences of keywords. These values are used to select which properties from your parent to merge into your project. To select only specific dependencies, specify the first part of the dependency atoms in a sequence with :only-deps. To see the actual values of these properties, run:

$ lein parent

Managed Dependencies

Leiningen 2.7.0 introduced support for a :managed-dependencies property in your leiningen project file. Using this property, you can define version numbers in the :managed-dependencies section without causing the dependencies to be realized / enforced. Then, you can omit the version number from the :dependencies section and just specify the dependency group id / artifact id. This will cause the dependency to be realized, and the version will be inherited from the :managed-dependencies section.

When combined with lein-parent, this allows you to :inherit the :managed-dependencies section from a parent project and share the version numbers for common dependencies across many child projects. This can be very powerful in reducing the burden of dealing with transitive dependency version conflicts across multiple projects.

For example:

(defproject superfun/myparent "1.0.0"
   :managed-dependencies [[clj-time "0.12.0"]
                            [me.raynes/fs "1.4.6"]
                            [ring/ring-codec "1.0.1"]])

(defproject superfun/kid-a "1.0.0-SNAPSHOT"
   :parent-project {:coords [superfun/myparent "1.0.0"]
                    :inherit [:managed-dependencies]}
   :dependencies [[clj-time]
                  [me.raynes/fs]])

(defproject superfun/kid-b "1.0.0-SNAPSHOT"
 :parent-project {:coords [superfun/myparent "1.0.0"]
                  :inherit [:managed-dependencies]}
 :dependencies [[clj-time]
                [ring/ring-codec]])

For more information, see leiningen's docs on Managed Dependencies

License

Copyright © 2014 Alex Chin

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License either version 1.0 or (at your option) any later version.