Compatibility

Emacs

CIDER supports Emacs 26.1+. More generally we try to support the last 3 major Emacs releases when that’s feasible and doesn’t add a lot of maintenance overhead.

We pay special attention to supporting whatever Emacs is bundled with the current stable Debian and RHEL GNU/Linux distributions.

nREPL

CIDER supports nREPL 1.0+.

We pay special attention to supporting whatever nREPL is bundled with the current stable Leiningen release.

Java

CIDER officially targets Java 8, Java 11, Java 17, and the most recent rapid release version (e.g. Java 18). Generally speaking, we aim to support all Java releases that are currently officially supported by Oracle.

The requirements for Java are pretty much cider-nrepl's requirements.

On Linux you are also required to make sure that JDK sources and javadocs are installed. You can find example commands in Troubleshooting.

Clojure

CIDER targets Clojure 1.8+. As Clojure doesn’t have the concept of supported releases we have to get a bit creative to determine the minimum version to target.

The minimum required Clojure version is currently derived using data from the most recent State of Clojure survey. In general we consider a Clojure release eligible for dropping once its usage drops below 5%, but we’d not drop support for any release just for the sake of doing it. We’d do it only if this would lessen the maintenance burden or open up the possibility for big CIDER improvements.

ClojureScript

Currently we apply the same policy for Clojure and ClojureScript support.

Compatibility Matrix

For a very long time CIDER and cider-nrepl were released in lock-step, but this changed in CIDER 0.18. The actual releases diverged for the first time in CIDER 0.23.

Below you can find the official compatibility matrix for CIDER.

Table 1. Compatibility Matrix
CIDER Emacs nREPL cider-nrepl Required JDK Required Clojure

0.22

25.1

0.6

0.22

8

1.8

0.23

25.1

0.6

0.22

8

1.8

0.24

25.1

0.6

0.24

8

1.8

0.25

25.1

0.6

0.25

8

1.8

0.26

25.1

0.6

0.25

8

1.8

1.0

25.1

0.6

0.25

8

1.8

1.1

25.1

0.6

0.25

8

1.8

1.2

26.1

0.9

0.27

8

1.8

1.3

26.1

0.9

0.28

8

1.8

1.4

26.1

0.9

0.28

8

1.8

1.5

26.1

0.9

0.28

8

1.8

1.6

26.1

1.0

0.29

8

1.8

1.7

26.1

1.0

0.30

8

1.8

1.8

26.1

1.0

0.40

8

1.8

1.9

26.1

1.0

0.41

8

1.8

1.12

26.1

1.0

0.44

8

1.9

1.13

26.1

1.0

0.44

8

1.9

You can also check the requirements of a particular CIDER version by inspecting the values of some CIDER variables. For instance, the required cider-nrepl version is in cider-required-middleware-version, and so on.