How to execute a bash script as sbt task?

Question

I want to automatically build documentation for my Java Play 2.3 application. At the moment, I use a Makefile to generate images from *.dotfiles and combine Markdown sources together into Html/PDF:

dot diagram1.dot -Tpdf -o diagram1.pdf dot diagram2.dot -Tpdf -o diagram2.pdf pandoc doc1.markdown -o doc1.pdf # ... 

Now I want to run these simple bash commands directly from SBT. What's the best way to do this?

I found some SBT Documentation plugins in the SBT reference, but nothing to run a simple shell script.

Answer 1

You can find some answers in External Processes in the official documentation of sbt, e.g.

To run an external command, follow it with an exclamation mark !:

 "find project -name *.jar" ! 

Don't forget to use import scala.sys.process._ so ! can be resolved as a method of String.

Do the following in activator console (aka sbt shell) to execute yourshell.sh - mind the eval command and the quotes around the name of the script:

eval "yourshell.sh" ! 

To have it available as a task add the following to build.sbt of your project:

lazy val execScript = taskKey[Unit]("Execute the shell script")  execScript := {   "yourshell.sh" ! }