How to force sbt to fetch everything it needs once?

Question

I'm working in a project in a very security concious place with no access via proxy to all the online repositories SBT usually requires. We'd like to fetch the dependencies and transitive dependencies we need once.

How can sbt be forced to fetch all the dependencies a project needs once and from there on, only work offline? I have tried doing exactly that from home. I then copied over everything under:

~/.ivy2/cache
~/.ivy2/local
$ACTIVATOR_HOME/repository

but still SBT even when executed with sbt "set offline := true" run goes and tries to fetch everything online ... is a pain. Then finally breaks and complains it doesn't find some dependency.

UPDATE: I noticed another source of troubles but can't yet conclude it is the culprit of the OP broken build issue. I build and get the dependencies for the project from a Linux (Ubuntu box) and then I copy all the files to the corporate Windows 7 Pro environment. I found that many property files under ~/.ivy2/cache refer to the absolute path of the activator repository directory in Ubuntu and this is of course incorrect in the Windows env e.g.

#ivy cached data file for ch.qos.logback#logback-classic;1.1.3
#Fri Mar 10 08:39:37 CET 2017
artifact\:ivy\#ivy.original\#xml\#-1844423371.location=/opt/dev/activator/1.3.12/repository/ch.qos.logback/logback-classic/1.1.3/ivys/ivy.xml
artifact\:ivy\#ivy\#xml\#1016118566.is-local=true
artifact\:ivy\#ivy\#xml\#1016118566.location=/opt/dev/activator/1.3.12/repository/ch.qos.logback/logback-classic/1.1.3/ivys/ivy.xml
artifact\:ivy\#ivy.original\#xml\#-1844423371.is-local=true
artifact\:ivy\#ivy\#xml\#1016118566.exists=true
artifact\:logback-classic\#jar\#jar\#804750561.is-local=true
artifact\:logback-classic\#jar\#jar\#804750561.location=/opt/dev/activator/1.3.12/repository/ch.qos.logback/logback-classic/1.1.3/jars/logback-classic.jar
artifact\:ivy\#ivy.original\#xml\#-1844423371.exists=true
artifact\:logback-classic\#jar\#jar\#804750561.exists=true

So I went and did a find and replace but the build still doesn't work. It doesn't look like a brilliant idea to have thousands of property files hardcoding an absolute path to the activator location. I would rather prefer they use an environment variable for that.

Answer 1

Maybe you could try coursier? No only it offers

better offline mode - one can safely work with snapshot dependencies if these are in cache (SBT tends to try and fail if it cannot check for updates)

but also is much faster than Ivy due to parallel artifacts downloading. The project is young but promising.