Using Scala libraries with new compiler versions

Posted in Scala

I recently needed to use Scalacheck with a milestone release of the compiler, and it took me a little while to wrap my head around the infrastructure. To preserve the steps for prosperity, I’m documenting them here, as I couldn’t find it described anywhere.

The first step is to understand the relationship between the various parts:

  • SBT is responsible for compiling your project, running tests, and generally performing the same role as make or ant. It also uses Ivy for retrieving library dependencies.

  • Apache Ivy provides an infrastructure for dependency management. Libraries exist in repositories, similar to Debian package repositories, and they are available in multiple versions.

When you add library dependencies in your project’s SBT configuration, it will find the code by first looking in your local Ivy repository, then in any remote repositories that are configured. In other words, even if you don’t have access to the remote repositories, you can still put libraries in your local repository to be found by SBT.

Libraries such as Scalacheck that are intended to be used with multiple versions of Scala will typically use the crossScalaVersions setting to build against multiple compiler versions. The workflow to get a library working is, then:

  1. Get ahold of the source code to the library

  2. In build.sbt, find the crossScalaVersions setting. Add the desired version of Scala.

  3. Run sbt. At the command line, type + test. This will compile the project for each configured version of Scala and run the tests.

  4. Assuming the project passes, run + publish-local to push the compiled version

Now, the library will be available in your other projects.