Lowering the Drawbridge

Drawbridge 0.4 is out! If your reaction is “Draw-what now?”, I can’t really blame you - Drawbridge is easily the most obscure project in the nREPL stable, and it has spent most of its life in a state best described as “technically maintained”. I’ve set out to change that recently, and this post is both a release announcement and the story of a 14-year-old project that never quite lived up to its potential. Hopefully, until now. What’s Drawbridge, anyway? In case you’ve never come across it: Drawbridge is an HTTP transport for nREPL, packaged as a humble Ring handler. You mount it in your web application, and suddenly you can REPL into that application over plain HTTP(S) - no open socket, no special network setup, just another route in your app: (ns my-app.repl (:require [drawbridge.core :refer [secure-ring-handler]] [ring.adapter.jetty :refer [run-jetty]])) (defn -main [& _] (run-jetty (secure-ring-handler :token (System/getenv "DRAWBRIDGE_TOKEN")) {:port 8080 :join? false})) Chas…