SBT Error: "Failed to construct terminal; falling back to unsupported..."

Question

I have run into an ERROR with SBT today. It can best be shown with the sbt sbt-version command:

Run on 5/29/17:

eric@linux-x2vq:~$ sbt sbt-version Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM warning: ignoring option  MaxPermSize=256M; support was removed in 8.0 [info] Set current project to eric (in build file:/home/eric/) [info] 0.13.13 

Run on 6/1/17:

eric@linux-x2vq:~$ sbt sbt-version Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM warning: ignoring option              MaxPermSize=256M; support was removed in 8.0 [ERROR] Failed to construct terminal; falling back to unsupported java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string: "0x100" at java.lang.NumberFormatException.forInputString(NumberFormatException.java:65) at java.lang.Integer.parseInt(Integer.java:580) at java.lang.Integer.valueOf(Integer.java:766) at jline.internal.InfoCmp.parseInfoCmp(InfoCmp.java:59) at jline.UnixTerminal.parseInfoCmp(UnixTerminal.java:233) at jline.UnixTerminal.<init>(UnixTerminal.java:64) at jline.UnixTerminal.<init>(UnixTerminal.java:49) at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:62) at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:45) at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:423) at java.lang.Class.newInstance(Class.java:442) at jline.TerminalFactory.getFlavor(TerminalFactory.java:209) at jline.TerminalFactory.create(TerminalFactory.java:100) at jline.TerminalFactory.get(TerminalFactory.java:184) at jline.TerminalFactory.get(TerminalFactory.java:190) at sbt.ConsoleLogger$.ansiSupported(ConsoleLogger.scala:123) at sbt.ConsoleLogger$.<init>(ConsoleLogger.scala:117) at sbt.ConsoleLogger$.<clinit>(ConsoleLogger.scala) at sbt.GlobalLogging$.initial(GlobalLogging.scala:43) at sbt.StandardMain$.initialGlobalLogging(Main.scala:64) at sbt.StandardMain$.initialState(Main.scala:73) at sbt.xMain.run(Main.scala:29) at xsbt.boot.Launch$$anonfun$run$1.apply(Launch.scala:109) at xsbt.boot.Launch$.withContextLoader(Launch.scala:128) at xsbt.boot.Launch$.run(Launch.scala:109) at xsbt.boot.Launch$$anonfun$apply$1.apply(Launch.scala:35) at xsbt.boot.Launch$.launch(Launch.scala:117) at xsbt.boot.Launch$.apply(Launch.scala:18) at xsbt.boot.Boot$.runImpl(Boot.scala:41) at xsbt.boot.Boot$.main(Boot.scala:17) at xsbt.boot.Boot.main(Boot.scala)  [info] Set current project to eric (in build file:/home/eric/) [info] 0.13.13 

No changes (that I know of) to either my SBT or Java setup.

Any ideas on what might be causing this or how to fix the error?

Thank you!

Answer 1

I had the same issue, especially when the TERM environment variable is set to xterm-256color. Setting it to a different value fixed the issue for me, e.g.

export TERM=xterm-color 

Answer 2

I found the package which causes this issue: ncurses. I downgraded ncurses to version ncurses-6.0+20170429-1 (I am using Arch Linux) and SBT starts just fine.

Steps for Arch Linux:

cd /var/cache/pacman/pkg sudo pacman -U ncurses-6.0+20170429-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz # or some other older version 

Steps for Mac: see https://github.com/jline/jline2/issues/281

I think this issue was introduced with ncurses version 20170506, see: http://invisible-island.net/ncurses/NEWS.html#index-t20170506

+ modify tic/infocmp display of numeric values to use hexadecimal when       they are "close" to a power of two, making the result more readable. 

I filed an issue on the SBT issue tracker: https://github.com/sbt/sbt/issues/3240

Edit: SBT version 0.13.16 includes the fix for this problem.