Sbt 0.12.4+ required on project import

Question

I'm currently reading the Play for Scala: Covers Play 2 book by Peter Hilton (publisher: Manning) , and trying to stick to the versions they've outlined in the book (Play version 2.1.1).

I downloaded the new IntelliJ IDEA 14 CE app and installed it. I'm currently importing the project, and it's failing because it wants a version of sbt that is 0.12.4 or greater.

This issue occurred in 13 the other day, but I haven't had time to resolve it, so please, no recommendations to go back to 13 :)

Here is the meat of the issue: When I type sbt --version on the CLI, it prints sbt launcher version 0.13.6. I have a "greater" version, but it appears that IDEA doesn't recognize this.

In an effort to specify my own SBT launcher JAR, I pointed my custom launcher (in IDEAs global settings) to the one in /usr/local/Cellar/sbt/0.13.6/libexec/sbt-launch.jar, but the build also failed with the same error.

As you may have guessed at this point, I have used Homebrew to install and manage Scala and sbt. When I first started working with Scala back in February, I remember having to make a few small tweaks in my settings to get IDEA to find Scala, but my version of IDEA 14 is totally fresh -- I did not import any previous settings. I downloaded the Scala and sbt plugins and they appear to be properly configured after a cursory look and creation of a new test project.

Here is what I'm failing to understand: First, and most obvious, why would an sbt version that meets the supposed requirement (0.12.4+) fail with version 0.13.*?

Second, is the bundled sbt with IDEA also greater than this version? Is there possibly an sbt flag somewhere in my system that's pointing it to an earlier version? A side note, I have a few versions of sbt in my "Cellar", but all are greater than 0.13.

Many thanks for your help!

Answer 1

I had a look at the code samples from Manning's website, and the project/build.properties files for each project specify sbt.version=0.12.2. My guess is that the Intellij Scala plugin only supports SBT 0.12.4, and cannot import you project which is configured to use an older version (hence why it recommends that you "update your project definition").

You should try using sbt.version=0.12.4 in the project/build.properties file.

Generally speaking, keep in mind that when an SBT version is specified in project/build.properties, the SBT launcher downloads the specified version and uses it to build the project. In your case, that means that the SBT 0.13.6 launcher will download SBT 0.12.2 and use that version to build the project.