Every time I’ve needed to start a new Akka project, I’ve had to go through the process of scaffolding a new project from scratch. So I finally got around to creating a skeleton project that includes the bare minimum dependencies along with a build file, plugins and configuration required to create a fat jar as well as the ability to run in place. You can find the akka-skeleton project here.

To get going with akka-skeleton,

1. Modify the organization, name & version in build.sbt
2. Rename the package heirarchy under src/main/scala
3. Ensure you have atleast one class that extends App
4. sbt run

Included Dependencies

1. Akka Actor Module
2. Akka Agent Module
3. Google Guava
4. Joda Time (and joda-convert to make it work correctly with Scala)
5. JUnit, ScalaTest and Akka TestKit
6. Akka SLF4J Adapter

File Structure

The project root looks like this:

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project/
src/
build.sbt

project

The project folder contains all the files that help SBT build the project.

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project
|-Dependencies.scala
|-build.properties
|-plugins.sbt

• build.properties describes the SBT version used to build the project
• plugins.sbt describes all the SBT plugins used to build the project – for example, the assembly plugin is used to create a fat jar of the project including all the dependencies
• Dependencies.scala describes all the project dependencies – objects from here are imported by the build.sbt file when building the project

The src folder contains the project source, test and resource files.

Build, Run and Assembly

sbt clean to clean.
sbt compile to build.
sbt run to run.
sbt assembly to create a fat jar.