§Installing Play

§Prerequisites

To run the Play framework, you need JDK 6 or later.

If you are using MacOS, Java is built-in. If you are using Linux, make sure to use either the Sun JDK or OpenJDK (and not gcj, which is the default Java command on many Linux distros). If you are using Windows, just download and install the latest JDK package.

Be sure to have the java and javac commands in the current path (you can check this by typing java -version and javac -version at the shell prompt).

§Install Activator

Play is distributed through a tool called Typesafe Activator. Typesafe Activator provides the build tool (sbt) that Play is built on, and also provides many templates and tutorials to help get you started with writing new applications.

Download the latest Activator distribution and extract the archive to a location where you have both read and write access. (Running activator writes some files to directories within the distribution, so don’t install to /opt, /usr/local or anywhere else you’d need special permission to write to.)

§Add the activator script to your PATH

For convenience, you should add the Activator installation directory to your system PATH. On UNIX systems, this means doing something like:

export PATH=$PATH:/relativePath/to/activator

On Windows you’ll need to set it in the global environment variables. This means update the PATH in the environment variables and don’t use a path with spaces.

If you’re on UNIX, make sure that the activator script is executable.

Otherwise do a:

chmod a+x activator

If you’re behind a proxy make sure to define it with set HTTP_PROXY=http://<host>:<port> on Windows or export HTTP_PROXY=http://<host>:<port> on UNIX.

§Check that the activator command is available

From a shell, launch the activator -help command.

$ activator -help

If everything is properly installed, you should see the basic help:

You are now ready to create a new Play application.

Next: Creating a new application

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