I've been dusting off my very dusty Clojure parens and recently ran into a head scratcher when attempting to mess around with enlive in a Clojure repl.

When attempting to follow along tutorial I naively popped open my repl and attempted to require enlive like so:

(require [net.cgrand.enlive-html :as html])

And received the following lovely exception:

CompilerException java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: net.cgrand.enlive-html

Thanks to this informative stackoverflow post, I was reminded of the difference between require nested within the ns macro and require run inside of a repl.

The solution is to do the work the ns macro is doing for you, namely, to quote the vector you are passing to require:

(require '[net.cgrand.enlive-html :as html])
(html/text (first (html/select (html/html-resource (java.net.URL. "https://clojure.org"))  [:.clj-header-message])))

Quoting without confusion is a good reference here if you (like me) get confused by quotes.

Additionally, for easy repling, it's probably easier to do this with use (which will clobber your current namespace but is worth it for hacking) or to stick this all in a file and use the load/in-ns combo (more on that here):

; e.g. for src/my_ns.clj
; that has a ns of `my-ns`
(load "my_ns")
(in-ns 'my-ns)
; you can now access variables defined in that namespace
(my-ns/my-func "argc")

Hopefully this helps shortcut someone else. Cheers!