How do I run an sbt main class from the shell as normal command-line program?

Question

How can I run an sbt app from the shell, so that I can run my app as a normal command-line program (as if run directly via scala but without having to set up an

Answer 1

The start-script SBT plugin is now at:

https://github.com/sbt/sbt-start-script

It requires a few steps to set up and generates scripts that do not work on OS X, but that can be easily fixed if you're on that platform (see below).

Setup

1. Install greadlink (OS X only):

   a) brew install coreutils

   b) map readlink to the new function (greadlink) by adding these lines to ~/.bashrc:

   function readlink() { greadlink "$@"; }

   export -f readlink`

2. Add start-script plugin to ~/.sbt/plugins/build.sbt:

   addSbtPlugin("com.typesafe.sbt" % "sbt-start-script" % "0.8.0")

3. Add start-script task to current project:

   $ sbt add-start-script-tasks # execute from directory where build.sbt resides

4. Add start-script support to current build.sbt:

   import com.typesafe.sbt.SbtStartScript

   seq(SbtStartScript.startScriptForClassesSettings: _*)

Note the blank line in between statements (de rigueur for SBT build files).

Generate Start Script

Then, whenever you want to create a script to start your app like sbt run-main, but without sbt, execute:

$ sbt start-script

Run

target/start mypackage.MyMainClass