Tech TLDR;

How to install old version of SBT using Homebrew

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I’ve recently ran into issue where our projects were expecting to run with SBT version 0.13.12, but the only version that was installing with home-brew via brew install sbt was 1.0.1.

Global Setting

I’ve Googled and realized that I can install older version with brew install sbt@0.13 but this installed version 0.13.16 which was still incompatible with our projects.

After few hours of pulling my hair out a co-worker pointed out that I can specify needed sbt version via command line as such: sbt -sbt-version 0.13.12 and it work, but it would be very painful to run it like that every time.

I was thinking of adding an alias, but then I saw something in logs when re-installing sbt one more time.

Global settings should be placed in /usr/local/etc/sbtopts

I’ve opened the /usr/local/etc/sbtopts in editor, uncommented and edited the following:

# Sets the SBT version to use.
-sbt-version  0.13.12
Code language: CSS (css)

After that sbt ran with the needed version, even though I had version 1.0.1 installed.

Local Setting

Another way of setting sbt version (as was suggested in comments) is at project level. To do so:

  1. Edit project/build.properties and add sbt.version=0.13.16 in there.
  2. Run sbt sbtVersion to pick up version from build.properties file.