This is quite an old question, and there have been some recent changes that make this much easier.
There are two main things that you want:
- Control should return to the REPL so you can keep interacting with your server. This is accomplished by adding {:join? false} to options when starting the Jetty server.
- You’d like to automatically pick up changes in certain namespaces when the files change. This can be done with Ring’s “wrap-reload” middleware.
A toy application would look like this:
(ns demo.core
(:use webui.nav
[clojure.java.io]
[compojure core response]
[ring.adapter.jetty :only [run-jetty]]
[ring.util.response]
[ring.middleware file file-info stacktrace reload])
(:require [compojure.route :as route] view)
(:gen-class))
; Some stuff using Fleet omitted.
(defroutes main-routes
(GET "https://stackoverflow.com/" [] (view/layout {:body (index-page)})
(route/not-found (file "public/404.html"))
)
(defn app
[]
(-> main-routes
(wrap-reload '(demo.core view))
(wrap-file "public")
(wrap-file-info)
(wrap-stacktrace)))
(defn start-server
[]
(run-jetty (app) {:port 8080 :join? false}))
(defn -main [& args]
(start-server))
The wrap-reload function decorates your app routes with a function that detects changes in the listed namespaces. When processing a request, if those namespaces have changed on disk, they are reloaded before further request processing. (My “view” namespace is dynamically created by Fleet, so this auto-reloads my templates whenever they change, too.)
I added a few other pieces of middleware that I’ve found consistently useful. wrap-file handles static assets. wrap-file-info sets the MIME type on those static assets. wrap-stacktrace helps in debugging.
From the REPL, you could start this app by using the namespace and calling start-server directly. The :gen-class keyword and -main function mean that the app can also be packaged as an uberjar for startup from outside the REPL, too. (There’s a world outside the REPL? Well, some people have asked for it anyway…)