Where is sbt inside Typesafe Activator?

Question

I am trying out the Play Framework 2.3.2 using the offline installation with Typesafe Activator 1.2.3. Every piece of documentation tells me that it's using sbt under the covers to build and run projects.

Where is this sbt located/installed? Is it somewhere in the unzipped folder that contained the Activator installation?

How do I start sbt from command line? It's not on the PATH as running locate sbt finds nothing.

Answer 1

The activator-launcher-<version>.jar is actually the sbt launcher with an additional properties file embedded.

If you run activator shell (or any other command you may have used with sbt like compile or package) you're starting sbt itself that in turn executes the commands.

Here's the path of applications that get launched:

1. activator ui launches the activator UI which launches a sub-sbt process to build
2. activator new launches the activator template creation terminal application.
3. activator shell or activator <sbt input> launches sbt itself.

In addition, the activator script attempts to detect if it's run from a "UI" context, e.g. double-clicking from Windows Explorer or OSX Finder. If so, the script will automatically start in UI mode.