Dealing with long classpaths

By default, when the native packager generates a script for starting your application, it will generate an invocation of java that passes every library on the classpath to the classpath argument, -cp. If you have a lot of dependencies, this may result in a very long command being executed, which, aside from being aesthetically unpleasing and difficult to work with when using tools like ps, causes problems on some platforms, notably Windows, that have limits to how long commands can be.

There are a few ways you can work around this in the native packager.

Generate a launcher jar

The native packager includes a plugin that allows generating a launcher jar. This launcher jar will contain no classes, but will have your projects main class and classpath in its manifest. The script that sbt then generates executes this jar like so:

java -jar myproject-launcher.jar

To enable the launcher jar, enable the LauncherJarPlugin:

enablePlugins(LauncherJarPlugin)

Generate a classpath jar

The classpath jar is very similar to the launcher jar, in that it also has the classpath on its manifest, but it does not include the main class in its manifest, and so executed by the start script by invoking:

java -cp myproject-classpath.jar some.Main

To enable the classpath jar:

enablePlugins(ClasspathJarPlugin)

Configure a wildcard classpath

JDK 6 and above supports configuring the classpath using wildcards. To enable this, simply override the scriptClasspath task to only contain *, for example:

scriptClasspath := Seq("*")

One downside of this approach is that the classpath ordering will no longer match the classpath ordering that sbt uses.