Documentation

You are viewing the documentation for the 2.6.11 release in the 2.6.x series of releases. The latest stable release series is 3.0.x.

§Installing Play

This page shows how to download, install and run a Play application. There’s a built in tutorial that shows you around, so running this Play application will show you how Play itself works!

Play is a series of libraries available in Maven Repository, so you can use any Java build tool to build a Play project. However, much of the development experience Play is known for (routes, templates compilation and auto-reloading) is provided by SBT. In this guide we describe how to install Play with SBT.

§Prerequisites

Play requires Java 1.8. To check that you have the latest JDK, please run:

java -version

You should see something like:

java version "1.8.0_121"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_121-b13)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.121-b13, mixed mode)

If you don’t have the JDK, you have to install it from Oracle’s JDK Site.

§Installing Play with SBT

We provide a number of sample projects that have ./sbt and sbt.bat launchers for Unix and Windows environments respectively. These can be found on our download page. The launcher will automatically download dependencies without you having to install SBT ahead of time.

Or, refer to the SBT download page to install the SBT launcher on your system, which provides the sbt command.

Note: See sbt documentation for details about how to setup sbt. We recommend that you use the latest version of sbt.

If your proxy requires user/password for authentication, you need to add system properties when invoking sbt instead: ./sbt -Dhttp.proxyHost=myproxy -Dhttp.proxyPort=8080 -Dhttp.proxyUser=username -Dhttp.proxyPassword=mypassword -Dhttps.proxyHost=myproxy -Dhttps.proxyPort=8080 -Dhttps.proxyUser=username -Dhttps.proxyPassword=mypassword

§Running Play with SBT

SBT provides all the necessary commands to run your application. For example, you can use sbt run to run your app. For more details on running Play from the command line, refer to the new application documentation.

§Congratulations!

You are now ready to work with Play! The next page will show you how to create projects from the command line and some more detail about creating new applications.

Next: Creating a new application