You can’t, but you can include it as a local dep somewhat cumbersomely

clojure -Sdeps ‘{:deps {a/b {:local/root “/some/path”}}}’ -X hello/-main

ok, thanks!

Depending on what you're really trying to do, I'd probably do:

(cd ~/somepath; clojure -X hello/-main ...)

(I often run (cd <somewhere>; <do something>) style commands when I want to stay where I am but run a command somewhere else)

True... well since you asked... I'm trying to write a todo cli app which uses datomic. So I want to do a "list", "add", "delete", "all" and have it invoke 4 functions (or main with an extra argument.) Sort of a datomic hello world of sorts. My thought was to use three aliases. $ alias tlist = 'bla bla; clojure bla bla main bla tlist' <-- lists todo items not yet done $ alias tadd= 'bla bla; clojure bla bla main bla tadd' <-- adds a new todo item $ alias tdone = 'bla bla; clojure bla bla main bla tdone xx' <-- marks a todo item done $ alias tall = 'bla bla; clojure bla bla main bla tall xx' <- shows all todos current and marked done

Seems a tad clunky, but my goal is to be able to invoke these from any directory in the filesystem...

so I could do the alias xx='pushd; cd ....; clojure ....; popd' or use a shellscript for dispatch... its fine.

oh, I see you did the () so it runs in a subshell... clever that bit.

Right, then you don't need pushd/`popd`

I have a ~/bin directory on my PATH and tend to drop stuff in there rather than use aliases much -- then you don't have to worry about how to process command-line arguments in an alias...

> I often run (cd <somewhere>; <do something>) style commands when I want to stay where I am but run a command somewhere else > Great tip! This feels like something I should have already been doing regularly for a long time. Yet I have never used it before.

A common one:

for d in oss/*; do (cd $d && git pull); done

babashka supports this pattern now: when you invoke a script in a "remote" directory, it respects the bb.edn in that remote directory. This turned out to be pretty handy for system-wide scripts, so you don't have to change the current working directory or write a bash wrapper

Babashka also supports the --config argument, which allows you to specify the location of its config file. Relative paths are resolved based on that file's location.

This would be a very useful addition to clojure cli, as it avoids messing with the current working directory or wrangling edn on the command line

Would this be appropriate as an Ask Clojure @U064X3EF3?

deps.clj already supports -Sdeps-file which is similar

except that it won't compensate for relative paths, local/roots, etc unlike bb's --config

you can test this with bb clojure -Sdeps-file if you have bb installed

(Just to be clear, because I was confused initially – deps.clj is a faithful but unofficial port of the tools.deps bash script)

yes, deps.clj is the clojure CLI rewritten from bash to clojure

So the original question is about being able to invoke an arbitrary clojure application from any directory. The trouble with cd-ing into the directory is it changes your working directory, which means you no longer have access to the files at the shell's pwd. I would recommend in this case that you use a clojure tool installation with a local dep coordinate.

clj -Ttools install com.myself.local/my-tool '{:local/root "/some/absolute/path"}' :as local-tool

clj -Tlocal-tool fun-name :some '"args"'

Although if you intend to distribute this to anyone besides yourself, I might recommend that instead of using the clojure tools cli in order to provide arguments, you might look into using jlink and jpackage to produce a standalone version of your application which you can then distribute via a package manager, and invoke like a normal command line tool.

or graalvm binary

or babashka CLI

Yeah, both are also good options.

For my own part I think that graalvm native binaries are good but losing classloader stuff is a pretty big cost for some applications and with AOT and jpackage you can still get pretty good startup time.