Author of the article here. Clojure is more commonly loaded and compiled on the fly, so the easiest way to run a single .clj file is to just do clojure your_file.clj. This uses the official Clojure CLI. Compiling to class files (AOT compilation) is usually reserved for production deployments, where you build an (uber)jar.

That said if you want to just compile a single namespace, you do that with Clojure’s compile function. It’ll look for the namespace on the classpath (defaults to src), and write the resulting classes to classes.

;; src/foo.clj
(ns foo
  (:gen-class))

(defn -main [& args]
  (apply println "GOT ARGS" args))

Then from the shell:

$ mkdir classes
$ clojure -e "(compile 'foo)"

You’ll need the Clojure and Spec jars to be able to run this:

$ java -cp $HOME/.m2/repository/org/clojure/clojure/1.11.2/clojure-1.11.2.jar:$HOME/.m2/repository/org/clojure/spec.alpha/0.5.238/spec.alpha-0.5.238.jar:classes foo hello
GOT ARGS hello

Why a .class? I use this trick to make my .clj file executable:

#!/bin/bash # -*- mode: Clojure; -*-
#_(

   #_DEPS is same format as deps.edn. Multiline is okay.
   DEPS='
   {:deps {
           clj-http/clj-http {:mvn/version "3.12.3"}
           cheshire/cheshire {:mvn/version "5.11.0"}
           }}
   '

   #_You can put other options here
   OPTS='
   -J-Xms4m -J-Xmx256m
   '
#_Install Clojure if not present on the system (java is needed though)

LOCAL_CLOJURE_DIR="$HOME/.local/share/clojure"
CLOJURE="$LOCAL_CLOJURE_DIR/bin/clojure"
if [[ ! -x "$LOCAL_CLOJURE_DIR/bin/clojure" ]]; then
  [[ ! -d "$LOCAL_CLOJURE_DIR" ]] && mkdir -p "$LOCAL_CLOJURE_DIR"
  pushd "$LOCAL_CLOJURE_DIR"
  #_Using Posix instructions https://clojure.org/guides/install_clojure#_posix_instructions
  curl -L -O https://github.com/clojure/brew-install/releases/latest/download/posix-install.sh
  chmod +x posix-install.sh
  ./posix-install.sh -p $PWD
  popd
fi

exec $CLOJURE $OPTS -Sdeps "$DEPS" -M "$0" "$@"
)

(ns my-program
  (:require [clj-http.client :as client]
            [clojure.pprint :as pp]
            [clojure.java.io :as io]
            [clojure.java.shell :refer [sh]]))

(defn -main [& args]
  (pp/pprint args))

(apply -main *command-line-args*)

https://gist.github.com/yogsototh/dc16e3213115c8305720f8c74d4a8297

If you’re using deps.edn to build your clojure project you probably want tools.build to produce an uberjar. https://clojure.org/guides/tools_build#_compiled_uberjar_application_build

Why do you want it to run like java ClassName in the first place? To me that seems a bit arbitrary, and really doesn’t work unless you add the Clojure runtime on the classpath.

Though I assume you just want to run a .clj file as a command on the command line, and there Babaskha is the de-facto standard tool to that these days.

Here’s a raw way with cli-tools:

$ mkdir -p classes
$ echo '(ns hello (:gen-class :main true)) (defn -main [] (println "Hello world!"))' > hello.clj
$ clojure -Sdeps '{:paths ["."]}' -e "(compile 'hello)"
WARNING: Implicit use of clojure.main with options is deprecated, use -M
hello
$ java -cp classes:$HOME/.m2/repository/org/clojure/clojure/1.12.0/clojure-1.12.0.jar:$HOME/.m2/repository/org/clojure/spec.alpha/0.5.238/spec.alpha-0.5.238.jar hello
Hello world!

Obviously, if you want an easier way of setting up the classpath, then the tooling is there for you. But if you don’t want to use it…

$ mkdir -p src/example
$ cat >src/example/core.clj <<EOF
(ns example.core
  (:gen-class))

(defn -main
  [& args]
  (println "foo"))
EOF
$ mkdir out
$ java -cp clojure.jar:src -Dclojure.compile.path=out clojure.lang.Compile example.core
Compiling example.core to out
$ java -cp clojure.jar:out example.core
foo