Is it possible to use typesafe activator laucher to achieve the same thing as the zip release?

Question

As a scaffolding tool, the official release has a size of 238MB , which is too big and I already have an repo on my local, why activator ships another repo and continue downloading the existing dependencies into it?

The launcher is actually really small, < 50K, is it possible to use it like sbt, just use the activator launcher to achieve the same functions as in the full release?

Answer 1

Yes. The repository is only their for convenience. The actual size of the "bootloader" of Activator is something like 2Mb. If you delete the "repository" directory from the activator zip, then everything will still work, but dependencies will be downloaded on demand.

Another hidden feature is if you download a particular template from the website (see go to http://typesafe.com/activator/template/activator-akka-spray and click the download link), you'll get a a launcher for activator which is standalone.

The activator.bat/activator/activator-launcher-<version>.jar files are the only portion of the distribution you really need to run.