How to execute a bash script as sbt task?

Question

I want to automatically build documentation for my Java Play 2.3 application. At the moment, I use a Makefile to generate images from *.dotfiles and combine Markdown sources together into Html/PDF:

dot diagram1.dot -Tpdf -o diagram1.pdf
dot diagram2.dot -Tpdf -o diagram2.pdf
pandoc doc1.markdown -o doc1.pdf
# ...

Now I want to run these simple bash commands directly from SBT. What's the best way to do this?

I found some SBT Documentation plugins in the SBT reference, but nothing to run a simple shell script.

Jacek Laskowski · Accepted Answer · 2018-06-11T08:58:03.040

72

You can find some answers in External Processes in the official documentation of sbt, e.g.

To run an external command, follow it with an exclamation mark !:
 "find project -name *.jar" !

Don't forget to use import scala.sys.process._ so ! can be resolved as a method of String.

Do the following in activator console (aka sbt shell) to execute yourshell.sh - mind the eval command and the quotes around the name of the script:

eval "yourshell.sh" !

To have it available as a task add the following to build.sbt of your project:

lazy val execScript = taskKey[Unit]("Execute the shell script")

execScript := {
  "yourshell.sh" !
}

edited Jun 11 '18 at 08:58

answered Jul 28 '14 at 22:59

Jacek Laskowski

72,696
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I'm trying to run the following command which contains double quotes and it fails to execute. It just prints whatever is within the double quotes. `"mongo test -eval \"db.dropDatabase()\"" !` This is an issue for every command containing quotes. – WarLord Jun 15 '16 at 11:01
1

Can you use triple quotes instead? – Jacek Laskowski Jun 15 '16 at 18:03
1

Is it possible to honour the response code of the script as well as log the complete output – johnflan Jan 05 '18 at 16:36

Steffen · Answer 2 · 2016-09-21T18:04:05.023

We had the requirement to execute some npm scripts as sbt task and let the build fail if one of the npm scripts fails. Took me some time to find a way to create a Task that works on Windows and Unix. And so here is what I came up with.

lazy val buildFrontend = taskKey[Unit]("Execute frontend scripts")

buildFrontend := {
      val s: TaskStreams = streams.value
      val shell: Seq[String] = if (sys.props("os.name").contains("Windows")) Seq("cmd", "/c") else Seq("bash", "-c")
      val npmInstall: Seq[String] = shell :+ "npm install"
      val npmTest: Seq[String] = shell :+    "npm run test"
      val npmLint: Seq[String] = shell :+    "npm run lint"
      val npmBuild: Seq[String] = shell :+   "npm run build"
      s.log.info("building frontend...")
      if((npmInstall #&& npmTest #&& npmLint #&& npmBuild !) == 0) {
        s.log.success("frontend build successful!")
      } else {
        throw new IllegalStateException("frontend build failed!")
      }
},
(run in Compile) <<= (run in Compile).dependsOn(buildFrontend)

How to execute a bash script as sbt task?

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