nsbt: a fast client for sbt 1.0.x server

nsbt is a native command line client for the new sbt 1.0.x server.

With it you can:

• send commands to sbt (like update or compile) very quickly, fast enough that it can be called from scripts or as a oneshot command in your shell (no JVM startup time)
• or get a simple shell to send commands interactively.

⚠️ This requires an unreleased version of sbt (sbt 1.0.x).

Limitations

• No autocompletion in the built-in shell
• No coloration of the output
• On the sbt server side, not all commands are very server-aware yet, and specifically, not all commands send their output back to the client (e.g. the run command doesn't, it ends up in the server's shell)

Why?

This was mostly an excuse to play with the new tokio libraries for asynchronous IO in Rust. And maybe solve an actual pain point of my sbt workflow at the same time! ✨

Installation

1. Install rustc and cargo, usually via the rustup tool, or your distribution's package manager. nsbt will build with the latest stable version of Rust.

2. Run the command (from anywhere):

cargo install --git https://github.com/gourlaysama/nsbt.git

This will download, build and install nsbt in the ~/.cargo/bin/ directory. You can then add that directory to your $PATH or symlink to the binary from somewhere in your $PATH.

Usage

1. Run sbt in your project's directory and then the new server command.

   This requires a version of sbt 1.0.x that contains 8c9dfda (any SNAPSHOT of 1.0.0 published after 2017-01-16).

2. From anywhere, run nsbt <command>... to submit commands to it, (e.g. nsbt clean compile).

   By default, nsbt will connect to 127.0.0.1 on port 5369 (the default port picked by the server). The host and port can be changed with -H/--host and -p/--port. See -h/--help for all options.

3. Running nsbt with no command as argument, or with the last command being :shell, will open a simple readline-based shell to submit commands. Then use :exit to quit the client shell.