How to use Twitter Bootstrap 2 with play framework 2.x

Question

I know that current Play! distribution has a helper for Bootstrap 1.4. What should I do if I want to use the current version of Bootstrap?

Answer 1

A quick and maintainable approach is to use WebJars (a client-side dependency manager by Typesafe Dev Advocate: James Ward), with a few lines in your Build.scala, you can easily add Bootstrap (e.g. version 2.3, 3.0, etc) - and much more - to your project.

1) Here's the documentation example for adding Bootstrap 2.3 to Play 2.1, in your Build.scala:

import sbt._
import Keys._
import play.Project

object ApplicationBuild extends Build {
  val appName         = "foo"
  val appVersion      = "1.0-SNAPSHOT"

  val appDependencies = Seq(
    "org.webjars" %% "webjars-play" % "2.1.0-2",
    "org.webjars" % "bootstrap" % "2.3.2"
  )

  val main = Project(appName, appVersion, appDependencies).settings()
}

2) Then add an entry to your routes file:

GET     /webjars/*file                    controllers.WebJarAssets.at(file)

3) Add the relevant links to your templates:

Note that WebJars will actually try and find your resources for you, you don't need to full qualify the asset locations.