Yeah, I tried calling codox/generate-docs from my build.clj. I hadn’t tried adding the paths to the build alias. I’ll give it a shot.

there's no magic here - you're just running a Clojure program with a classpath. If you need something additional on the classpath, just add it. :)

Yeah. I just would have thought it inherited the top-level paths if I didn’t override them in the alias

yeah, it intentionally does not

there's some extended info on this at https://clojure.org/guides/tools_build#_setup

"Tools executed with -T:an-alias remove all project deps and paths, add "." as a path, and include any other deps or paths as defined in :an-alias."

In general, tool execution (-T) means "run a separate tool" and thus your project deps/paths are not included

gotcha. makes sense. thanks!

then it complains about not being able to find the top-level :deps referenced in macros when codox tries to generate the docs

codox might just be a hard one to tool-ify w/o some modifications huh?

I’m not understanding that

You might need to add the :deps too

Yeah, me neither really. Just throwing macro expansion errors about not finding any libs I’m pulling in via top-level deps

As I said above, you don’t have your :deps when running a tool, unless you pull them in

Yeah I’ll just leave it as a process invocation for now

Maybe open an issue about accepting a basis in codox and see what they think

(Maybe I will, that is)

You could also give #C03EC4DD26S a "quick" try, it doesn't load the code but uses clj-kondo analysis (for better or worse!)

ah, cool. I'll check it out, thanks!

I assume you mean something broader here than just "put everything you'll need into the build alias"?

makes me wonder if there'd be any benefit to a tools.build.api fn along the lines of clojure-command or exec-alias? perhaps there's not much to be gained beyond what you get with (b/process {:command-args ["clojure" "-X:foo" ...]})

we have a ticket for that already and eventually I'll get to it

oh, ok. great!

https://clojure.atlassian.net/browse/TBUILD-6

the issues outlined by Sean in the comments are tied up with other things and that's the main reason this doesn't exist yet

@U06FS3DLH We have a variant of the code from TBUILD-6 in our build.clj at work and it's pretty nasty so I would say, for now, using the -M style invocation for subprocesses is just so much easier.

I haven't looked at Codox but I get the impression it expects to be run in the project's context (classpath etc) rather than as a separate tool? Codox would need to accept args to specify deps.edn files and aliases etc and then use t.d.a itself to build the basis and then walk all the code...

(which is why it's hard to run directly in-process in build.clj right?)

yeah exactly

It's also possible to start a clojure process using deps.clj

which works as Clojure dependency as well, although it doesn't really have a nice Clojure API:

(borkdude.deps/-main "-Sdeps" <deps-map>" "-M" "-e" ...)