I took my twitter-retriever project and reworked it to use Gradle. It is as twitter-retriever-gradle.
To a certain degree, this may just be about satisfying my curiosity. But then again, you might find yourself at a company that uses a lot of JVM languages and everyone knows gradle. Plus I think that a lot of people in the Clojure community are not too thrilled about having to deploy one monster uberjar. With Gradle, you can keep your jars separate.
Before I go any further, let’s go over some issues. I was not able to get the tests to work. The directory structure is different than leiningen, and I had to make a copy of a file. I was not able to use environ for some reason, so I had to hard-code the database info (a lot of Clojure libraries assume you are using lein or boot; to be fair, Clojure people usually are). I will try again; I might just go with cprop [Note 1].
This requires the nebula-clojure-plugin. The Nebula plugins are Gradle plugins made by Netflix. This plugin does not have a lot of documentation. I had to search the source code to see how to do some things. It adds the tasks “clojureRun”, “clojureRepl” and “clojureTest”. You can still call “clean” and “build” as before. I also enabled the application plugin, so “distZip” works.
First thing you have to do is move the files in src/clojure to src/main/clojure.
You can run it two different ways. One is directly with Gradle:
gradle clojureRun --fn='twitter-retriever.work/-main --user=GitHub --oauth=YourNameHere'
I think you have everything after the –fn in a single quote.
You can also use the application plugin. You specify the main class in build.gradle. I found out you can also put in a few command line args as well. For Clojure, your main function will not change, so you can add that along with clojure.main:
mainClassName = "clojure.main --main twitter-retriever.work"
Then run “gradle distZip”, and it will create a tar and a zip file in build/distributions. Expand these, and run the script in the “bin” directory. You can add further command line args when you run it:
bin/twitter-retriever-gradle --user=TweetsToGet --oauth=YourID
For database access, I am using conman, which under its hood uses hugsql. You put your SQL statements in an SQL file which is read in. I put the file on the classpath at “twitter_retriever/sql/statements.sql” (which in this case was $PROJECT/src/main/clojure/twitter_retriever/sql/statements.sql). Gradle could find that when I ran it with the “gradle” command on the command line. But to run it from the expanded zip file that was produced by the distZip command, that did not work. I had to make a copy of the file at $PROJECT/resources/twitter_retriever/sql/statements.sql. Each location only worked for one run method, so I need two copies. I will see if I can get this to work with one file. cprop might help here.
I could not get the tests to run. (First off, the tests must go into src/test/clojure.) It kept having an issue finding statements.sql on the classpath. I tried putting it into src/test/resources/twitter_retriever/sql, but that did not help. Again, cprop might take care of this.
I did not try running a REPL with “gradle clojureRepl”. I was able to use a REPL and do a few things by calling M-x cider-jack-in in an emacs file. When I did, a little option popped up at the bottom asking me if I was using lein or gradle.
So the experiment was not a complete success, but there is some potential.
You’re welcome.
Note 1: I am leaning towards cprop for the regular twitter-retriever. Like the crop README says: What if you have 100 args? That’s 100 properties to put in the environment.
Image from ‘Forum iudicum, Tabulae Chronologicae, Canones Ecclesiae et Opuscula Grammaticae’, an 11th century manuscript at the National Library of Spain, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.