Installing Leiningen on Windows

September 5, 2015 | microsoft | programming | clojure |

Leiningen is an awesome tool for getting up and running with Clojure. They have a super simple bash or .bat script for getting up and running on OS X, Linux, and Windows. The home page does an awesome job explaining how to get started with OS X and Linux but not so much on Windows.

This is a very similar process to what I wrote about previously on Setting up ANTLR4 on Windows. If you do not already, make sure that you have Java Installed (the latest version should work fine).

Create Batch Command for lein

Download lein.bat and save it somewhere. I put all of my random Java libraries in C:\Javalib to make them easy to find. So that is where I put this bat script.

Add C:\Javalib to your PATH

Open up File Explorer
Right Click on This PC
Select Properties
On the left hand side of the new window select Advanced System Settings
On the bottom of this screen select Environment Variables…
Find the PATH variable
Append ;C\Javalib\; to the existing PATH variable

Install and Test to make sure everything works

Open up a command prompt and type in lein self-install. This will install lein.
Now you can type lein repl to start a REPL session

user=> (+ 2 2)
;= 4
user=> (printf "Clojure on Windows is Awesome!")
;= Clojure on Windows is Awesome!nil

If nothing is bombing out, you are all set and ready to hack on some Clojure! Why not check out the CircleCI frontend for inspiration?

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Clicks Communicator from Chris Hannah
A Year Of Vibes from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
Pluralistic: A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance (18 Dec 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Moving from WordPress to Substack from charity.wtf
Grow, Like a Tree Not a Cancer from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
Pluralistic: All the books I reviewed in 2025 (02 Dec 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
DEP-18: A proposal for Git-based collaboration in Debian from Optimized by Otto
[RIDGELINE] No Phones in The Ten-don Shop from Craig Mod — Writer + Photographer

Generated by openring

Lev Lazinskiy