Getting started with Lift and Lifty - scala

Question

I am trying to get started with the Lift framework, reading Lift in Action. I would like to follow along with the examples, but I immediately stumble into a problem with installing Lift. I know that there are various ways to get started easily with Lift, but I would like to use Lifty, as the book does, to be able to follow it.
The problem is that both Lifty and sbt (and Lift too!) have moved forward since the book was published. I installed sbt from the Typesafe repository for Ubuntu. Now I am stuck trying to install Lifty.
Following Lifty documentation and this answer on SO - due to the fact that Lifty has not released a binary for sbt 0.11.3 - I figured I should put the following in ~/.sbt/plugins/build.sbt:
resolvers += Resolver.url("sbt-plugin-releases", new URL("http://scalasbt.artifactoryonline.com/scalasbt/sbt-plugin-releases/"))(Resolver.ivyStylePatterns)
addSbtPlugin("org.lifty" % "lifty" % "1.7.4")
libraryDependencies +=
Defaults.sbtPluginExtra(
"org.lifty" % "lifty" % "1.7.4",
"0.11.2",
"2.9.1"
)
The latter is to tell sbt to use the Lifty plugin for sbt 0.11.2.
Now sbt seems to be able to download Lifty and starts correctly, but I do not have a lifty command. So when I do
lifty learn lift https://raw.github.com/Lifty/lifty/master/lifty-recipe/lifty.json
sbt complains:
[error] Not a valid key: lifty (similar: history)
[error] lifty learn lift https://raw.github.com/Lifty/lifty/master/lifty-recipe/lifty.json
[error] ^
How should I install Lifty? Please note that I am new to Scala, sbt and Lift.
EDIT
I managed to install Lifty by downgrading to sbt 0.7.7. But then if I do
> lift create project-blank
> reload
> update
I get the error
[error] sbt.ResolveException: unresolved dependency: net.liftweb#lift-webkit_2.9.1;2.3-RC3: not found
[error] unresolved dependency: org.scala-tools.testing#specs_2.9.1;1.6.6: not found
[info] == update ==
[error] Error running update: sbt.ResolveException: unresolved dependency: net.liftweb#lift-webkit_2.9.1;2.3-RC3: not found
[error] unresolved dependency: org.scala-tools.testing#specs_2.9.1;1.6.6: not found

Answer 1

I hate to break it to you, but lifty is gone. As of this writing, sbt's stable is 0.13.0. Looking at sbt community repo, the only version that was released was 1.7.4 for sbt 0.11.2.
The official website says:
The Lift Cookbook is the most up-to-date resource to learn how to use Lift.
There's a section named Creating a Lift Project from Scratch Using SBT:
Problem
You want want to create a Lift web project from scratch without using the ZIP files provided on the official Lift website.
Solution
You will need to configure SBT and the Lift project yourself. Luckily, only five small files are needed.
First, create an SBT plugin file at project/plugins.sbt (all filenames are given relative to the project root directory):
addSbtPlugin("com.earldouglas" % "xsbt-web-plugin" % "0.3.0")
This file tells SBT that you will be using the xsbt-web-plugin.
Next, create an SBT build file, build.sbt...
Unfortunately xsbt-web-plugin 0.3.0 is for sbt 0.12. So you have to either use sbt 0.12, or modify the instruction a bit. The latest xsbt-web-plugin for sbt 0.13 is 0.4.2, so in project/plugins.sbt put:
addSbtPlugin("com.earldouglas" % "xsbt-web-plugin" % "0.4.2")
resolvers += Resolver.sonatypeRepo("public")
I was able to follow along with the rest of instructions on the page...
Eventually I got everything pulled in by sbt 0.13, and was able to start the container:
> container:start
[info] Compiling 1 Scala source to /foo/sbt-lift-test/target/scala-2.10/classes...
[info] jetty-8.1.7.v20120910
....
[success] Total time: 2 s, completed Sep 20, 2013 10:34:22 PM
Open http://localhost:8080/ using the browser:
Welcome, you now have a working Lift installation