Using sbt plugin for creating IntelliJ IDEA project files

Of course I'm a lazy developer -- who not -- ? So I started searching for a sbt plugin to generate the IntelliJ IDEA project files. I found two which seem to work pretty well.

• mpeltonen
• orfjackal 

So I decided to go with the mpeltonen plugin. You have two choices. You can configure the plugin for sbt globally or on a per project basis. I will now configure the plugin for the demo project only.

nxp10009@NXL01366 /c/workspaces/pelssers/demo/project
$ vi plugins.sbt

resolvers += "Sonatype snapshots" at "http://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots/"

addSbtPlugin("com.github.mpeltonen" % "sbt-idea" % "1.2.0-SNAPSHOT")

If you start sbt again now for the demo project you will see it will fetch the dependencies.

nxp10009@NXL01366 /c/workspaces/pelssers/demo
$ sbt
[info] Loading project definition from C:\workspaces\pelssers\demo\project
[info] Updating {file:/C:/workspaces/pelssers/demo/project/}default-a9f0a5...
[info] Resolving com.github.mpeltonen#sbt-idea;1.2.0-SNAPSHOT ...
[info] Resolving commons-io#commons-io;2.0.1 ...
[info] Resolving org.scala-sbt#sbt;0.12.0 ...

Now we can use the gen-idea command to generate our project files

> gen-idea
[info] Trying to create an Idea module demo
[info] Resolving org.scala-lang#scala-library;2.9.2 ...
[info] downloading http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/scala-lang/scala-library/2.9.2/scala-library-2.9.2-sources.jar ...
[info]  [SUCCESSFUL ] org.scala-lang#scala-library;2.9.2!scala-library.jar(src) (887ms)
[info] downloading http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/scala-lang/scala-library/2.9.2/scala-library-2.9.2-javadoc.jar ...
[info]  [SUCCESSFUL ] org.scala-lang#scala-library;2.9.2!scala-library.jar(doc) (5127ms)
[info] Excluding folder target
[info] Created C:\workspaces\pelssers\demo/.idea/IdeaProject.iml
[info] Created C:\workspaces\pelssers\demo\.idea
[info] Excluding folder C:\workspaces\pelssers\demo\target
[info] Created C:\workspaces\pelssers\demo\.idea_modules/demo.iml
[info] Created C:\workspaces\pelssers\demo\.idea_modules/demo-build.iml
>

And my colleague Ivan pointed me to this link from the guardian which covers the topic into more detail.