Leiningen is for automating Clojure projects without setting your hair on fire.
It offers various project-related tasks and can:
- create new projects
- fetch dependencies for your project
- run tests
- run a fully-configured REPL
- compile Java sources (if any)
- run the project (if the project isn't a library)
- generate a maven-style "pom" file for the project for interop
- compile and package projects for deployment
- publish libraries to repositories such as Clojars
- run custom automation tasks written in Clojure (leiningen plug-ins)
If you come from the Java world, Leiningen could be thought of as "Maven meets Ant without the pain". For Ruby and Python folks, Leiningen combines RubyGems/Bundler/Rake and pip/Fabric in a single tool.