Can multi-projects from GIT be used as SBT dependencies?

Question

I would like to use banana-rdf in my project, ideally by defining it as a dependency in a build.scala using dependsOn:

lazy val root = Project("root", file(".")) dependsOn RootProject(uri("git://github.com/w3c/banana-rdf"))

However, banana-rdf is a multi-project so needs to be composed differently. From what I can see, these multi-project definitions only allow you to specify project locations as file paths, and won't allow URIs.

Question: Am I right in saying that I have to clone these multi-project GIT dependencies into my project and reference them as folders?

I rather like the idea of leaving all the GIT cloning up to SBT, and having these cloned in some tmp SBT folder rather than cluttering up my project...

Answer 1

I depend on Banana RDF subprojects all the time with ProjectRef, like this:

lazy val core: Project = Project(
  ...
).dependsOn(
  ProjectRef(uri("git://github.com/w3c/banana-rdf.git"), "banana-jena")
)

One especially nice part is that you can just tack a commit or branch name as a fragment identifier on the URI and everything works exactly as you'd expect.