I am not familiar with leiningen or clojure, but it looks like you are just adding a list of requirements + version, which is exactly what you get with pip + requirements.txt file ?
I believe that's what's going on, yes. Leiningen runs on top of Maven and so it's downloading the jars you need and storing them in ~/.m2/ where they will be linked in at compile time.
A "lein uberjar" will roll your whole program up into one .jar file, ready for deployment.
