The Global Project

If you run cake outside of a project directory, it will use the global project. You can also use the --global option to run any command in the global project, no matter what your current directory is. The global project is automatically created in ~/.cake/project.clj the first time you use it.

So why do you need the global project?

It's useful for experimenting with clojure in a repl. You can add :dependencies to this project if you want to experiment with a new library. And any :dev-dependencies in the global project will be available in every project, though you have to run cake deps --global manually when you change ~/.cake/project.clj. Also, any configuration options in ~/.cake/config and any tasks in ~/.cake/tasks.clj will be available in every project.

For example, you could put subproject delcarations or JVM options in ~/.cake/config and commonly used tasks in ~/.cake/tasks.clj. Suppose you want to always run tests before releasing any project. Just add this line to ~/.cake/tasks.clj:

(deftask release #{test})

Another cool thing the global project enables is writing clojure shell scripts. Just add the following line to the top of a file, make it executable and executing it will run the clojure code in the global project. The file doesn't even have to end in .clj.

#!/usr/bin/env cake