PROFILES.md

Profiles

In Leiningen 2.x you can change the configuration of your project by applying various profiles. For instance, you may want to have a few extra test data directories on the classpath during development without including them in the jar, or you may want to have Swank Clojure available in every project you hack on without modifying every single project.clj you use.

By default the :dev, :user, and :default profiles are activated for each task, but the settings they provide are not propagated downstream to projects that depend upon yours. Each profile is defined as a map which gets merged into your project map.

The example below adds a "dummy-data" resources directory during development and a dependency upon "midje" that's only used for tests.

(defproject myproject "0.5.0-SNAPSHOT"
  :description "A project for doing things."
  :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.4.0"]]
  :profiles {:dev {:resources-path ["dummy-data"]
                   :dependencies [[midje "1.4.0"]]}})

You can place any arbitrary defproject entries into a given profile and they will be merged into the project map when that profile is active.

Declaring Profiles

In addition to project.clj, profiles specified in ~/.lein/profiles.clj will be available in all projects, though those from profiles.clj will be overridden by profiles of the same name in the project.clj file. This is why the :user profile is separate from :dev; the latter is intended to be specified in the project itself. In order to avoid collisions, the project should never define a :user profile, nor should profiles.clj define a :dev profile. Use the show-profiles task to see what's available.

If you want to access dependencies during development time for any project place them in your :user profile. Your ~/.lein/profiles.clj file could look something like this:

{:user {:plugins [[lein-swank "1.4.0"]
                  [lein-pprint "1.1.1"]]}}

Profiles are merged by taking each key and combining the value if it's a collection and replacing it if it's not. Profiles specified earlier take precedence when replacing. The dev profile takes precedence over user by default. Maps are merged recursively, sets are combined with clojure.set/union, and lists/vectors are concatenated. You can add hints via metadata that a given value should take precedence or be displaced if you want to override this logic:

{:profiles {:dev {:prep-tasks ^:replace ["clean" "compile"]
                  :aliases ^:displace {"launch" "run"}}}}

The exception to this merge logic is that plugins and dependencies have custom de-duplication logic since they must be specified as vectors even though they behave like maps (because it only makes sense to have a single version of a given dependency present at once). The replace/displace metadata hints still apply though.

Activating Profiles

Another use of profiles is to test against various sets of dependencies:

(defproject swank-clojure "1.5.0-SNAPSHOT"
  :description "Swank server connecting Clojure to Emacs SLIME"
  :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.2.1"]
                 [clj-stacktrace "0.2.4"]
                 [cdt "1.2.6.2"]]
  :profiles {:1.3 {:dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.3.0"]]}
             :1.4 {:dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.4.0-beta1"]]}})

To activate other profiles for a given run, use the with-profile higher-order task:

$ lein with-profile 1.3 test :database

Multiple profiles may be combined with commas:

$ lein with-profile qa,user test :database

Multiple profiles may be executed in series with colons:

$ lein with-profile 1.3:1.4 test :database

Debugging

To see how a given profile affects your project map, use the lein-pprint plugin:

$ lein with-profile 1.4 pprint
{:compile-path "/home/phil/src/leiningen/lein-pprint/classes",
 :group "lein-pprint",
 :source-path ("/home/phil/src/leiningen/lein-pprint/src"),
 :dependencies
 ([org.clojure/tools.nrepl "0.0.5" :exclusions [org.clojure/clojure]]
  [clojure-complete "0.1.4" :exclusions [org.clojure/clojure]]
  [org.thnetos/cd-client "0.3.3" :exclusions [org.clojure/clojure]]),
 :target-path "/home/phil/src/leiningen/lein-pprint/target",
 :name "lein-pprint",
 [...]
 :description "Pretty-print a representation of the project map."}

In order to prevent profile settings from being propagated to other projects that depend upon yours, the default profiles are removed from your project when generating the pom, jar, and uberjar. Profiles activated through an explicit with-profile invocation will be preserved. The repl task uses its own profile in order to inject dependencies needed for the repl to function.