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The Goal

You are familiar with Scala; you use IntelliJ for development; you are aware of the magic of sbt; now you want to try Lift for your experimental web app. You just bought a Scala Lift book, or you go to Lift Getting Started page, or to another Lift Getting Started page, and you encounter two problems:

You do not know where to start;
When you follow the hints, some important steps are missing;
Or you succeed, but you wind up with older versions of Scala, Lift, prototype code.

We have to fix this.

Prerequisites

You probably already have the following installed:

You will need the following:

Create a script for running sbt, something like

java -Xmx512M -jar \home\yourname\scala\sbt-launch-0.7.4.jar

Getting the Sample, Making It Run

First, create a directory where we will have our sample code, and check the code out from lift repository:

mkdir oursample
cd oursample
git clone git://github.com/lift/lift_21_sbt.git

Since we want to work in IntelliJ, let's run maven to generate an "archetype" from which we'll build IntelliJ project:

mvn archetype:generate -U -DarchetypeGroupId=net.liftweb -DarchetypeArtifactId=lift-archetype-basic -DarchetypeVersion=2.0-scala280-SNAPSHOT -DarchetypeRepository=http://scala-tools.org/repo-snapshots -DremoteRepositories=http://scala-tools.org/repo-snapshots -DgroupId=myFirstLiftApp -DartifactId=lift_21_sbt

See that lift_21_sbt contains the maven file pom.xml. You can already run the sample application via sbt:

cd lift_21_sbt
../../sbt

At prompt, enter

update

and then enter

jetty-run

In a minute or two you will have jetty run the sample app; just check out http://localhost:8080.

But this is not our goal; we want a project for IntelliJ.

Preparing IntelliJ Project

Plugins

You already have Scala plugin. You will need sbt and maven plugins installed and enabled. File→Settings→Plugins is where you find this. After installing sbt plugin, go to Settings→SBT and set the right location of sbt.jar

New Project

File→New Project...→Import project from external model As a root, select the directory .../lift_21_sbt where you have the newly-generated pom.xml file. IntelliJ will discover myFirstLiftApp:lift_21_sbt:1.0-SNAPSHOT; click through Next and Finish. In a minute or two you will see a project created; you could compile it... You are all set. Tweak the code ad libitum, compile... You may want to fix run configuration for scala console: Run -> Edit Configurations -> Edit Defaults; go to the Before launch options, uncheck Make and choose Run SBT Action / jetty-run. Then, when you have your code open, run it; sbt will launch jetty while you have scala console; here I am at loss on why do we need this console. But jetty works!

Creating Deployment War

You are still running

sbt, right? type package - and very soon you can find in .../lift_21_sbt/target/scala_2.8.0 a war file (with a weird name). You can deploy this file in Tomcat or Jetty, on your server - it runs the sample Lift app when launched.

Penelope Rabon

Posts: 1
Nickname: 65738
Registered: Apr, 2009