If you are a Clojure newbie (“noob”) like myself, you may run into this issue. I am only writing this since it took me a lot longer to resolve this “issue” than it should have. My hope in writing this article is to help future noobs Googling for a solution to the same problem.
As it happens, I am currently developing a web app using compojure on top of ring. As I had done a couple times before, I made an uberjar to deploy the web app as a standalone server:
$ lein uberjar
When I ran the jar, I was expecting the webapp to run. Instead I got a Clojure REPL prompt. Yes, I got a Clojure REPL prompt instead of my webapp deploying. No Jetty. No Webserver. Nope. Instead, a REPL prompt as follows:
$ java -jar webapp-0.1.0-standalone.jar
Clojure 1.6.0
user=>
I was perplexed. I tried to investigate the changes I made. Using git, I even went back to a prior commit which I knew worked. But I was unable to get the webapp to start. What the &\$#!@ was going on?
As such, I unziped the jar file and took a look at the META-INF/MANIFEST.MF file. The Main-Class value was: clojure.main. Grr!
Long story short: I traced back my bash history and noticed that I had dropped the ring! Of course, the command to generate a deployable webapp is the following:
$ lein ring uberjar
So, fellow Clojure noobs, the lesson is: don’t drop the ring!