Running 

This page describes how to use sbt once you have set up your project. It assumes you’ve installed sbt and went through sbt by example.

sbt shell 

Run sbt in your project directory with no arguments:

$ sbt

Running sbt with no command line arguments starts sbt shell. sbt shell has a command prompt (with tab completion and history!).

For example, you could type compile at the sbt shell:

> compile

To compile again, press up arrow and then enter.

To run your program, type run.

To leave sbt shell, type exit or use Ctrl+D (Unix) or Ctrl+Z (Windows).

Batch mode 

You can also run sbt in batch mode, specifying a space-separated list of sbt commands as arguments. For sbt commands that take arguments, pass the command and arguments as one argument to sbt by enclosing them in quotes. For example,

$ sbt clean compile "testOnly TestA TestB"

In this example, testOnly has arguments, TestA and TestB. The commands will be run in sequence (clean, compile, then testOnly).

Note: Running in batch mode requires JVM spinup and JIT each time, so your build will run much slower. For day-to-day coding, we recommend using the sbt shell or Continuous build and test feature described below.

Beginning in sbt 0.13.16, using batch mode in sbt will issue an informational startup message,

$ sbt clean compile
[info] Executing in batch mode. For better performance use sbt's shell
...

It will only be triggered for sbt compile, and it can also be suppressed with suppressSbtShellNotification := true.

Continuous build and test 

To speed up your edit-compile-test cycle, you can ask sbt to automatically recompile or run tests whenever you save a source file.

Make a command run when one or more source files change by prefixing the command with ~. For example, in sbt shell try:

> ~testQuick

Press enter to stop watching for changes.

You can use the ~ prefix with either sbt shell or batch mode.

See Triggered Execution for more details.

Common commands 

Here are some of the most common sbt commands. For a more complete list, see Command Line Reference.

Tab completion 

sbt shell has tab completion, including at an empty prompt. A special sbt convention is that pressing tab once may show only a subset of most likely completions, while pressing it more times shows more verbose choices.

sbt shell history 

sbt shell remembers history even if you exit sbt and restart it. The easiest way to access history is to press the up arrow key to cycle through previously entered commands.

Note: Ctrl-R incrementally searches the history backwards.

Through JLine’s integration with the terminal environment, you can customize sbt shell by changing $HOME/.inputrc file. For example, the following settings in $HOME/.inputrc will allow up- and down-arrow to perform prefix-based search of the history.

"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward
"\e[C": forward-char
"\e[D": backward-char

sbt shell also supports the following commands: