Using the Datomic free edition in a lein based project

Hopefully I can save a few people some time:

I flailed a bit trying to use the first released version yesterday but after updating a new version (datomic-free-0.8.3343) life is good. Download a recent release, and do a local maven install:

mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=com.datomic -DartifactId=datomic-free -Dfile=datomic-free-0.8.3343.jar -DpomFile=pom.xml

Setting a lein project.clj file for this version:

(defproject datomic-test "1.0.0-SNAPSHOT"
  :description "Datomic test"
  :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.4.0"]
                 [com.datomic/datomic-free "0.8.3343"]])

Do a lein deps and then in the datomic-free-0.8.3343 directory start up a transactor using the H2db embedded database:

cp config/samples/free-transactor-template.properties mw.propreties
bin/transactor mw.propreties

When you run the transactor it prints out the pattern for a connection URI and I used this in a modified version of the Datomic developer's Clojure startup example code:

(ns datomic-test.test.core
  (:use [datomic-test.core])
  (:use [clojure.test]))

(use '[datomic.api :only [q db] :as d])
(use 'clojure.pprint)

(def uri "datomic:free://localhost:4334//news")
(d/create-database uri)
(def conn (d/connect uri))

(def schema-tx (read-string (slurp "data/schema.dtm")))
(println "schema-tx:")
(pprint schema-tx)

@(d/transact conn schema-tx)

;; add some data:
(def data-tx [{:news/title "Rain Today", :news/url "http://test.com/news1", :db/id #db/id[:db.part/user -1000001]}])

@(d/transact conn data-tx)

(def results (q '[:find ?n :where [?n :news/title]] (db conn)))
(println (count results))
(pprint results)
(pprint (first results))

(def id (ffirst results))
(def entity (-> conn db (d/entity id)))

;; display the entity map's keys
(pprint (keys entity))

;; display the value of the entity's community name
(println (:news/title entity))

That was easy. You need to define a schema before using Datomic; here is the simple schema in data/schema.dtm that I wrote patterned on their sample schema (but much simpler!):

[
 ;; news

 {:db/id #db/id[:db.part/db]
  :db/ident :news/title
  :db/valueType :db.type/string
  :db/cardinality :db.cardinality/one
  :db/fulltext true
  :db/doc "A news story's title"
  :db.install/_attribute :db.part/db}

 {:db/id #db/id[:db.part/db]
  :db/ident :news/url
  :db/valueType :db.type/string
  :db/cardinality :db.cardinality/one
  :db/doc "A news story's url"
  :db.install/_attribute :db.part/db}

 {:db/id #db/id[:db.part/db]
  :db/ident :news/summary
  :db/valueType :db.type/string
  :db/cardinality :db.cardinality/one
  :db/doc "Automatically generated summary of a news story"
  :db.install/_attribute :db.part/db}

 {:db/id #db/id[:db.part/db]
  :db/ident :news/category
  :db/valueType :db.type/string
  :db/cardinality :db.cardinality/many
  :db/fulltext true
  :db/doc "Categories automatically set for a news story"
  :db.install/_attribute :db.part/db}

 ]

I hope this saves you some time :-)