Beginner's guide to SBT 0.10 and IDEA

Question

I\'m new to SBT and am unsure how to get a project started. Can someone point me to a beginner\'s guide to creating a Hello World type project, or give me some clues?

Answer 1

I wrote a very quick guide about it. It is not intended to be an SBT guide -- there's no way to beat the SBT Wiki for that. It would be pointless too, since one can just contribute to the wiki itself.

But, I think my very quick guide will get you up and running as you wish.

As for directory creation, the answer I got was that SBT expects the IDE to handle that -- I don't really like that attitude, but a plugin can do the job. You'll see I install the sbt eclipse plugin just so it will do it for me, even though I use IDEA myself (when I use an IDE).

Also, note that, ideally, you use both the IDEA plugin for SBT that you mentioned, and the SBT plugin for IDEA. See here for the list of plugins.

Unless the IDEA plugin has evolved a lot, you really need to generate an IDEA configuration from SBT iself -- IDEA won't "read" your configuration. That's what the SBT plugin for IDEA does. Install it, and sbt gen-idea. I expect that will solve the problem you mentioned.

Note, however, that the version of Scala you use to compile your project and the version of Scala that SBT uses for itself are different indeed. This is not a problem, it is as expected. I'm not sure from your question if the 2.8.1 version you mentioned is the one used by SBT, or one used by IDEA -- or even one used to compile your project, indicating that something is not working.

Where did you put the example you mentioned anyway? You should follow maven-style directory hierarchy, which means putting it on src/main/scala/, and possibly a subdirectory of that related to the package, if you follow Java convention as well.

And try to compile with sbt, to make sure that is working, before proceeding to IDEA.