Running with SBT

So, you are tired of your slow and half-dumb ides, ok, what can you do to make your scala dev cycle more agile? Use sbt.

First go to that website, and download the jar. Store it somewhere. Write a shell script or a bat file with the only command:

java -Xmx512M -jar wherever you store the jar/sbt-launch-0.7.4.jar

Go to your project directory and run your sbt there. It will ask you some questions regarding what version of Scala you want to order, the name of your project, the like. Then it will create an sbt project in that directory. Now the project expects the directory structure to follow maven rules of the game. You don't have to. Go to the directory named project, create a directory named build, and within that directory create a scala file Project.scala, that looks something like this:

import sbt._

class CategoriesProject(info: ProjectInfo) extends DefaultProject(info)
{
//  lazy val hi = task { println("Categories in Scala"); None } // that's for fun
  override def mainScalaSourcePath = "src" // your source directory
  override def mainResourcesPath = "resources" // fiik what is this for

  override def testScalaSourcePath = "tests" // your tests directory
  override def testResourcesPath = "test-resources" // fiik what is this for
  override def outputDirectoryName = "bin" // your output directory
}

Additionally, check out lib directory in your project; it probably contains already some stuff that sbt believes it needs - that is, scala-compiler.jar, and scala-library. Copy over there the other jars you believe you need. There should be a way to reference them where they are, but I have not figured it out yet.

Now start sbt again.

If you give it a command ~test, it will cycle through compiling the code and running the tests, automatically detecting what to compile and guessing what tests to run. As soon as you save a source file, sbt wakes up and does the job.

So... I love it... as do many other scala people.