how to make scala-cli repl behave similarly to sbt console

[ag91]

Thanks for the amazing scala-cli!

I like to open a repl to test ideas out and I find it awesome when I can just use the context of the file I am looking at.
Yesterday I discovered that I can do that jn an sbt project with scala-cli through the following steps:

1. add sbt assembly plugin (if it is not already there)
2. append to build sbt

assemblyMergeStrategy in assembly := {
  case PathList("META-INF", xs @ _*) => MergeStrategy.discard
  case x => MergeStrategy.first
}

3. start scala-cli with --jar option and the uberjar created by the assembly plugin

it requires a few steps, so I was planning to automate this.

Any chance this is an undocumented feature that scala-cli already support? If so, how can I do it in a simpler way before I start automating things?
And if not would it be a feature interesting to anyone else? I could share the script :)

[SethTisue]

like this?

% echo 'case class C(x: Int)' > C.scala
% scala-cli repl .
Compiling project (Scala 3.3.1, JVM (17))
Compiled project (Scala 3.3.1, JVM (17))
Welcome to Scala 3.3.1 (17.0.9, Java OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM).
Type in expressions for evaluation. Or try :help.
                                                                                                    
scala> C(5)
val res0: C = C(5)

[ag91]

that is cool indeed!
My context is a bit more complex though: I am in an sbt project that comes with external dependencies.
To give a sense: if you run sbt new http4s/http4s.g8 --branch 1.0 and try to run scala-cli . in the source directory with QuickstartRoutes.scala, you will see compilation errors because scala-cli didn't build the project and so doesn't know about the dependencies used.

My way around was to make a jar with all deps and feed that to scala-cli, so that I can hack in the repl the contents of the file I need (in my example I can run or redefine jokeRoutes because the QuickstartRoutes.scala has been packaged in the uberjar).

[SethTisue]

Does sbt’s console command do what you need?

[ag91]

yup, sbt console works fine.
I was just wondering if I could make scala-cli do the same in a simpler way than creating a uberjar manually.
I am trying to make this a smooth user experience in Emacs and I would need to integrate sbt console for that while I already integrated scala-cli.

[SethTisue]

You could export fullClasspath from sbt and then feed that to scala-cli repl -classpath.

[ag91]

that made the trick, thank you @SethTisue ! Just expanded my little Emacs extension: so cool!