Introduction

Clojure is a great language that is continuing to improve itself and expand its user base year over year. The Clojure ecosystem has many great libraries focused on being highly composable. This composability allows developers to easily build impressive applications from seemingly simple parts. Once you have a solid understanding of how Clojure libraries fit together, integration between them can become very intuitive. However, if you have not reached this level of understanding, knowing how all of the parts fit together can be daunting. Fear not, this series will walk you through start to finish, building a tested compojure web app backed by a Postgres Database.

Where We Are Going

The project we will build and test over the course of this blog series is an address book application. We will build the app using ring and Compojure and persist the data in a Postgres Database. The app will be a traditional client server app with no JavaScript. Here is a teaser of the final product.

Compojure / Ring the TL;DR Version

At the core of most Clojure web projects you will find Ring. Ring is a Clojure web application library, that abstracts the details of HTTP into a simple unified API. Compojure provides a concise syntax for generating Ring handlers. Ring and Compojure will be the heart of our address book application.

Let’s Get Started

We will build off of the default compojure template. The easiest way to start any Clojure project is to utilize Leiningen which we will use to get the default template by issuing the following command.

lein new compojure address-book

What the template gives us is a single route hello world app. You can checkout the app in your browser with

lein ring server

which will open the application in your default browser.

GET, POST and Tests

For the first installment of this blog series we are going to create and test a bare bones GET and POST scenario to get a feel for how Compojure Routes work and how we can test them.

Routes

In Compojure each route consists of: a HTTP method, a pattern that will match the requested URL, an argument list and the contents that will be returned as the response body to the requester. For example:

( GET "/example-route" [] "Response body" )

Here we specify that a GET request to /example-route with no arguments will return the string Response body .

Let’s modify the response that gets returned from the default “/” and add a POST route while we are at it. Modify the routes in src/address_book/core/handler.clj to look like the following:

( defroutes app-routes ( GET "/" [] "Example GET" ) ( POST "/post" [] example-post ) ( route/not-found "Not Found" ))

The contents that we return may come from a function as we are doing here with the POST route. Let’s add the example-post function above our routes definition.

( defn example-post [ request ] ( let [ post-value ( get-in request [ :params :example-post ])] ( str "You posted: " post-value )))

All body functions must accept the request as an argument. Here we are expecting that a field named example-post will be posted to the URL. We extract the :example-post keyword value from :params in our request and include it in the response. Since this is a throw away route we are not providing any way to make the post from the browser. We will prove that this works with a test instead.

To keep things streamlined for our example we are going to turn off the anti-forgery settings provided by Ring-Defaults so we can make our POST without the CSRF protection. You can read about how to enable it for your own projects at the link above. To turn if off for our example we set :anti-forgery to false in wrap-defaults like so.

( def app ( wrap-defaults app-routes ( assoc-in site-defaults [ :security :anti-forgery ] false )))

Tests

When it comes to writing Clojure tests you have a few options. For this application, we are going to use Midje. In order to use Midje we need to add [midje "1.6.3"] to dependencies and [lein-midje "3.1.3"] to plugins in project.clj . Now we can make test/address_book/core/address_book_tests.clj look like the following:

( ns address-book.core.address-book-tests ( :use midje.sweet ) ( :require [ clojure.test :refer :all ] [ ring.mock.request :as mock ] [ address-book.core.handler :refer :all ])) ( facts "Example GET and POST tests" ( fact "Test GET" ( let [ response ( app ( mock/request :get "/" ))] ( :status response ) => 200 ( :body response ) => "Example GET" )) ( fact "Test POST" ( let [ response ( app ( mock/request :post "/post" { :example-post "Some data" }))] ( :status response ) => 200 ( :body response ) => "You posted: Some data" )))

Now if we run

lein midje :autotest

you should see the message All checks (4) succeeded . We are using ring.mock to create a mock request map that we pass to our app. Notice how in the post route we are passing in the example-post field.

Wrap Up

With a basic GET and POST and two passing tests we arrive at the end of our first installment. In the next installment, our application will begin taking shape as we add hiccup templates to render HTML and a style sheet to make our project look presentable.

I have created a github repo that will have all the code for our project with tags corresponding to the parts of the blog. You can find all the code for this section in Part 1.