Format your code

When software is worked on by more than one person, disagreements on how that software is built will arise. This is normal, but one must take care to not let unproductive disagreements dominate their time.

How code is formatted is a common source unproductive disagreements. As such, leaving that to automated tooling can be a good idea.

• Add an alias for cljfmt to your deps.edn

  We are ultimately going to rely on our Justfile so we are going to make a regular alias, not one with :main-opts

  {:paths ["src"]
   :deps {org.clojure/clojure {:mvn/version "1.12.0"}
          ring/ring {:mvn/version "1.13.0"}
          metosin/reitit-ring {:mvn/version "0.5.5"}
          org.clojure/tools.logging {:mvn/version "1.3.0"}
          org.slf4j/slf4j-simple {:mvn/version "2.0.16"}
          hiccup/hiccup {:mvn/version "2.0.0-RC3"}}
   :aliases {:nREPL
              {:extra-paths ["dev"]
               :extra-deps
                {nrepl/nrepl {:mvn/version "1.2.0"}}}
             :dev {:extra-paths ["dev"]}
             :format {:deps {dev.weavejester/cljfmt {:mvn/version "0.13.0"}}}}}

• Make a .cljfmt.edn

  This file is where you can put configuration for cljfmt. I tend to think that sort-ns-references? should be on for my projects, so lets use that as the example.

  {:sort-ns-references? true}

• Add recipes to your Justfile for checking and fixing the format of your code

  Checking format without fixing it is useful to make automatic checks in CI.

  help:
      just --list
  
  run:
      clojure -M -m example.main
  
  nrepl:
      clojure -M:nREPL -m nrepl.cmdline
  
  format_check:
      clojure -M:format -m cljfmt.main check src dev
  
  format:
      clojure -M:format -m cljfmt.main fix src dev

• Run just format_check

  You will likely see some issues unless you are a cyborg with perfect typing skills.

• Run just format

  This should fix any errors reported above and just format_check will start to exit normally.