§Building Play from source

To benefit from the latest improvements and bug fixes after the initial beta release, you may want to compile Play from source. You’ll need a Git client to fetch the source.

§Grab the source

From the shell, first checkout the Play source:

$ git clone git://github.com/playframework/playframework.git

Then go to the playframework/framework directory and launch the build script to enter the sbt build console:

$ cd playframework/framework
$ ./build
> publish-local

Note that you don’t need to install sbt yourself: Play embeds its own version.

If you want to make changes to the code you can use publish-local to rebuild the framework.

§Build the documentation

Documentation is available at playframework/documentation as Markdown files. To see HTML, run the following:

$ cd playframework/documentation
$ ./build run

To see documentation at http://localhost:9000/@documentation

For more details on developing the Play documentation, see the Documentation Guidelines.

§Run tests

You can run basic tests from the sbt console using the test task:

> test

We are also using several Play applications to test the framework. To run this complete test suite, use the runtests script:

$ ./runtests

§Use in projects

Compiling and running projects using the Play version you have built from source requires some custom configuration.

Navigate to your existing Play project and make the following edits in project/plugins.sbt:

// Change the sbt plugin to use the local Play build (2.3-SNAPSHOT) 
addSbtPlugin("com.typesafe.play" % "sbt-plugin" % "2.3-SNAPSHOT")

Once you have done this, you can start the console and interact with your project normally:

% cd <projectdir>
% activator

§Using Code in Eclipse

You can find at Stackoverflow some information how to setup eclipse to work on the code.

Found an error in this documentation? The source code for this page can be found here. After reading the documentation guidelines, please feel free to contribute a pull request. Have questions or advice to share? Go to our community forums to start a conversation with the community.