Handling unmanaged classpath jars in a library using SBT so that a dependent project can access them

Question

I'm writing a library which depends on code (let's call it foo.jar) which is only available as a binary jar. As is standard, I'm putting this in the lib/ directory so SBT will treat is as an unmanaged dependency. This is fine so far.

However, since this is a library, I'd like to be able to publish it so that other projects which depend on it to also have access to the unmanaged code in foo.jar without having to manually locate it. I originally thought I could use a fat jar plugin such as SBT Assembly to create a jar with the dependencies, but that doesn't affect what is actually published using sbt publish-local – it only creates a fat jar when you run sbt assembly. Is there some standard simple way to handle this? It seems like a bad idea for every library which uses unmanaged dependencies to break when used by other projects downstream so I wonder if I'm missing something obvious.

Answer 1

I don't know if that's a good use of sbt-assembly, since other libraries could depend on a different version of foo.jar etc.

One way to work around it is to publish foo.jar in a Maven repository yourself. Some people in Scala and/or sbt community have been talking about bintray. It's still in beta, but looks promising if you want some jars published.