SBCL and Command-line Common Lisp Apps

Ok, first things first: read Xach's steps to creating small Common Lisp projects. Without it, I was unable to find anything as straight-forward as that to explain a process for creating Lisp projects. There is a lot of very useful stuff in there.

Second thing: I am not a Lisp expert so this may not be The One True Way to do things.

Finished reading? Good. Ok. Xach's article is not aimed at creating utilities to be run from the command line, but in full Lisp environments, like SLIME. Xach's guide gives you all the information you need as far as laying out your Lisp code and setting up ASDF system files are concerned. The last bits and pieces you need are concerned with the shell environment. So, you will need:

• Your code (obviously)
• An ASDF system file (from Xach's article)
• A Makefile to compile your code to .fasl and a .core (for SBCL)
• A shell script to run your .core file

The contents of the Makefile for a project named "my-project":

SBCL = /usr/local/bin/sbcl

all:
    $(SBCL) --eval "(require 'asdf)" --eval " \
        (progn \
         (asdf:oos 'asdf:load-op 'my-project) \
         (save-lisp-and-die \"my-project.core\"))"

clean:
    rm -rf *.fasl
    rm -rf *.core

This will compile all of the packages you defined in your ASDF system file into .fasl bytecode files and then save a .core file. Now all you need is a shell script to run the .core:

#!/bin/sh

SBCL=/usr/local/bin/sbcl

$SBCL --core my-project.core --noinform \
    --eval "(progn (my-project:main) (quit))"

And that'll do it! This assumes that your code has an exported defun, 'main', as the entry point for your program. Now run the shell script and your application will run.

Edit: Xach mentioned in the comments that you can use the :executable argument to save-lisp-and-die to create an executable, thus removing the need for the wrapper script above.

This is the build process I use for my little cl-mines game, so you can check out the setup there if there is anything that was unclear.