getting started with SBT for lift

Question

I am a complete newbie to SBT and scala world. I wanna create a lift application and while exploring on how to do it i stumbled everywhere that i must use SBT. So i went to the github wiki page and followed the instructions for windows. I downloaded the jar given there and created sbt.bat and put both the files in c:\sbt and added it to my path. Then i went c:\liftprojects and typed sbt.

It did something but as given everywhere i expected a wizard of some sort which will ask me what kind of project i wanna build and stuff and generate the directory structure just like mvn:archetype:generate but it didnt do anything. It just ran some downloads and created two dirs

project
  boot
    blah
  target
    blah
target
  scala 2.8.1
    blah

in github wiki it says sbt follows maven bir structure but i cannot see it here.

Am i doin something the wrong way. Im stuck on this. All i need is to know how to create a lift app or a scala project.

Answer 1

To get started with Lift 2.4 my recommendation is to clone the examples repository

git clone https://github.com/lift/lift_24_sbt

Then you can use one of the project templates in that repo, with both 2.8 and 2.9 Scala versions. For example, a good way to start with Lift is using the basic project (with Scala 2.8.1 in this example)

cd lift_24_sbt/scala_28/lift_basic/

Start sbt by typing

./sbt

On Windows use sbt.bat. Inside the sbt console, type

update

jetty-run

Open a web browser and point it to http://localhost:8080 to open the Lift application. To stop the application server, simply type jetty-stop. You can use this template project, or the other templates in that repo, as a starting point for your applications.

Lift wiki contains a lot of useful information. Specifically, you can follow the instructions getting started section here.