How to deploy your library to Clojars (on macOS)

Tags: clojure, macOS, clojars

Written on December 11, 2019

I wanted to publish my clojure library to Clojars,

but documents or how-tos about it were too complicated or outdated,

so I’m writing ths post for the record.

It was tested on my macOS machine.

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1. Generate your gpg key,

Generate a gpg key with a passphrase,

$ gpg --gen-key

2. Generate your deploy token,

Visit this page and generate a deploy token.

This deploy token will be used as your password.

3. Deploy to Clojars

$ lein deploy clojars

Then you’ll be asked to enter your Clojars username, password (deploy token), and gpg key’s passphrase.

If nothing goes wrong, you library will be uploaded to Clojars.

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Trouble Shooting

1. GPG signing fails while deploying to Clojars

If you suffer from this error: gpg: signing failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device,

$ export GPG_TTY=$(tty)

then run lein deploy clojars again.

2. Don’t want to type username and password again and again

If you don’t want to type your username and password everytime,

you can avoid it by creating .lein/credentials.clj.gpg file by:

$ vi ~/.lein/credentials.clj

and fill it with:

{#"https://repo.clojars.org"
  {:username "your-clojars-username"
   :password "your-clojars-deploy-token"}}

then convert it with:

$ gpg --default-recipient-self -e \
      ~/.lein/credentials.clj > ~/.lein/credentials.clj.gpg

# for security, delete the original .clj file:
$ rm ~/.lein/credentials.clj 

Your deploy token can be generated from here.

Now lein deploy clojars will not ask your username and password.

3. GPG decryption fails while deploying to Clojars

If you see following kind of error:

gpg: decryption failed: No secret key
Could not decrypt credentials from /Users/SomeUsername/.lein/credentials.clj.gpg
gpg: decryption failed: No secret key

decrypt your gpg key once,

# You need to type your gpg key's passphrase
$ gpg --decrypt ~/.lein/credentials.clj.gpg

then retry lein deploy clojars.

4. cljdoc complains about ‘unknown-revision’

When you see:

unknown-revision This issue may occur if you deployed to Clojars before pushing the Git commit the release was made at.

in your cljdoc page, check if you included your scm information in the project file.

If it is already set correctly, make sure you have checked-out the right branch when deploying to Clojars.

It also can be due to the wrong git tag (eg. which is not pushed to the scm yet) included in the package.

Written on December 11, 2019