Why it took so long to download sbt dependencies when I create a scala project in intellij idea?

Question

I am new to scala, when I create a scala project in intellij it took really so long to download all the jar files. I have installed the scala plugin for idea IDE. Could anyone please tell me what should I do to get on the right track? Thanks very much.

Answer 1

Since the scala language is really a library on top of the JVM, creating a scala project for the first time requires the download of the specified scala version from a maven repository (usually this is at least the compiler and library, which for 2.10 comes to ~20MB). This will happen the first time, even if you've installed that same version of scala on your machine outside of sbt.

Once you go through this the first time, though, the next project you create--whether via sbt on the command line or via an IntelliJ sbt project--will pull these dependencies from your local ivy cache instead.

However, should you change the language version in your project, it will once again have to download the full language dependencies for that version.