How to install Scala and sbt to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Scala is a really nice JVM based programming language. This post explains how to install it to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS system. If you don’t just play with Scala console but want to start a project, then you need Simple Build Tool (sbt) installed as well.

First of all let’s get root priviledges, update packages index and install some basic must-have things:

sudo su -
apt-get update
apt-get -y install curl git vim

Install Open JDK 7 and Scala:

apt-get install -y openjdk-7-jdk
apt-get install -y scala

Test from the command line:

$ java -version
java version "1.7.0_25"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea 2.3.10) (7u25-2.3.10-1ubuntu0.12.04.2) 
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 23.7-b01, mixed mode)

$ scala
Welcome to Scala version 2.9.1 (OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM, Java 1.7.0_25).
Type in expressions to have them evaluated.
Type :help for more information.

scala>

Now you have Scala version 2.9.1, it’s not latest but for each project you’ll have a possibility to install required version through sbt. So let’s go ahead and install it.

Download and install sbt-0.13:

wget http://repo.scala-sbt.org/scalasbt/sbt-native-packages/org/scala-sbt/sbt/0.13.0/sbt.deb --no-verbose
dpkg -i sbt.deb

Now you have sbt available from the command line. It’s time to return to your normal user login because sbt creates separate scala instances for each username. Next ask sbt to show scala console: sbt console. It will force sbt to download and deploy scala-2.10.2 which is default for sbt-0.13.

That’s it, enjoy your day with Scala and sbt!