Depending on various projects, sometimes there is the need to execute some actions on initialization just before our application starts to serve requests.

It was a common practice to call the functions that we wanted to get executed through GlobalSettings, however it is not recommended.

The other way around to achieve this is to implement a class which will be injected and thus add the code that we want to get executed on the class constructor.

We might believe that it is sufficient to implement a class which shall use the @Singleton annotation.

For example

@Singleton
class StartUpService {

    //The code that needs to be executed

}

But this will not work as expected since our component instances on play are created lazily when they are needed.

Instances are created lazily when they are needed. If a component is never used by another component, then it won’t be created at all. This is usually what you want. For most components there’s no point creating them until they’re needed. However, in some cases you want components to be started up straight away or even if they’re not used by another component. For example, you might want to send a message to a remote system or warm up a cache when the application starts. You can force a component to be created eagerly by using an eager binding.

To tackle this problem, our singleton has to be initialized eagerly. To achieve an eager initialization we will define an eager binding.

To define an eager binding we have to implement a class that extends the AbstractModule and then bind our service as an eager singleton.

package com.gkatzioura.eager

import com.google.inject.AbstractModule
import com.google.inject.name.Names

// A Module is needed to register bindings
class EagerLoaderModule extends AbstractModule {
  override def configure() = {

    bind(classOf[StartUpService]).asEagerSingleton
  }
}

Then we have to enable our module by declaring so to our conf/application.conf configuration.

play.modules.enabled += "com.gkatzioura.eager.EagerLoaderModule"

The above approach creates a module by defining it explicitly. The other approach is to use the default functionality where Play will load any class called Module that is defined in the root package.

In conclusion, play gives us the option to execute certain functions once the application has started. To do so we need to implement a component as an eager singleton. Skip the GlobalSettings as it is not advised by the official documentation.

Previously we had an introduction to sbt, its default tasks and how to add extra tasks.

Play comes with the sbt console. The SBT console is a development console based on sbt that allows you to manage a Play application’s complete development cycle.

Let us create a play application using sbt and see the commands provided.

sbt new playframework/play-scala-seed.g8

[warn] Executing in batch mode.
[warn]   For better performance, hit [ENTER] to switch to interactive mode, or
[warn]   consider launching sbt without any commands, or explicitly passing 'shell'
[info] Set current project to development (in build file:/home/gkatzioura/Development/)

This template generates a Play Scala project 

name [play-scala-seed]: PlayExample
organization [com.example]: com.gkatzioura
scala_version [2.11.11]: 
play_version [2.5.14]: 
scalatestplusplay_version [2.0.0]: 

The result is a play project named playexample. By opening with an editor the project/plugins.sbt we can see the sbt plugin added to our project.
Therefore we are going to check what are the extra tasks that the sbt plugin provides and some tasks that can be generally helpful.

cd playexample; sbt 
[PlayExample] $ <tab><tab>
Display all 511 possibilities? (y or n)
...
h2-browser  
...                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
playStop                                           
playUpdateSecret     
playGenerateSecret                              
...
stage
...

• playStop – Stop Play, if it has been started in non blocking mode
• playGenerateSecret – This will generate a new secret that you can use in your application. For example the application secret can be used for Signing session cookies and CSRF tokens or
  built in encryption utilities
• playUpdateSecret – Update the application conf to generate an application secret
• stage – Create a local directory with all the files laid out as they would be in the final distribution.
• h2-browser – Opens an h2 database browser. Pretty useful if you are using h2 for development

Those are some of the commands that you might use often. However if you want extra information, you can always type help play.

[PlayExample] $ help play

playExternalizeResources

  Whether resources should be externalized into the conf directory when Play is packaged as a distribution.

playCommonClassloader

  The common classloader, is ...
...

I’ve compiled a cheat sheet that lists some helpful sbt commands.
Sign up in the link to receive it.