Appendix A. Installing the Play Framework

The first thing you need to do to install the Play Framework is download it. There are several ways of working with Play: downloading a bootstrap utility called Activator or using it directly as a dependency in a standard sbt project. sbt is the build tool for Scala projects, and Play runs as an sbt plugin. The Activator utility is a thin wrapper around sbt that offers a few convenience features, such as creating new projects based on templates, or running a user interface to explore the possibilities offered by the Ligthbend technology stack (hence its name, as it activates the use of the technology stack).

To get started quickly, we’ll use the Activator utility.

Downloading and installing Play

Point your browser to https://www.playframework.com/download and download the latest version. You’ll get a zip file called typesafe-activator-1.3.10-minimal.zip (or a newer version thereof).

Setting up the environment on Linux or Mac OS X

Setting up the environment on Windows