How can I pass JVM options to SBT to use when running the app or test cases?

Question

I would like to specify JVM options when running my app or the tests for the app through SBT. Specifically, I need to be able to give the JVM the -Djava.security.policy parameter so that my policy is loaded and used for the test.

How can I do this with SBT?

Answer 1

With xsbt, you could run your test in a forked JVM (because of one of the reasons mentioned in "Running Project Code".

If you are using a forked jvm:

specify the configuration to affect only the main or test run tasks:

scala javaOptions in (Test,run) += "-Xmx8G" 

You should be able to specify any other options to that JVM through javaOptions.

---

The OP David Eagen reports that the following configuration didn't work at first, not because of the sbt options, but because of the path:

lazy val escacheServer = 
  Project( "escache-server", 
           file("server"), 
           settings = buildSettings ++ Seq(resolvers ++= 
                        Seq(scala_tools_snapshots, typesafe_repo), 
                        libraryDependencies ++= escacheServerDeps, 
                        javaOptions in run += "-Djava.security.policy=jini.policy", 
                        fork in run := true 
                      ) 
         ).dependsOn(escache) }

It looks like my problem was that jini.policy wasn't found in the current directory.
I set the full path and now it runs.