SBT can't read environment variables in IntelliJ

Question

I defined a new environment variable in ~/.zshrc like that: export JVM_XMX=-Xmx2048M. I can verify that it was set correctly running export command and finding it in the list.

Now I want to use it in SBT. I've tried these two approaches:

sys.env("JVM_XMX")

sys.env.get("JVM_XMX")

But the value couldn't be found or the Option is None. Errors that I see are:

NoSuchElementException: key not found: JVM_XMX

NoSuchElementException: None.get

What I also tried was to add the variable into SBT in IntelliJ Settings. I went to Build, Execution, Deployment -> Build Tools -> sbt and set VM parameters to -DJVM_XMX=-Xmx2048M. It didn't help.

Anyone knows how to setup SBT to work with IntelliJ correctly?

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Versions used:

sbt 1.2.8

IntelliJ IDEA 2019.2.1

Answer 1

If you'd like this property to be part of your project, and not only in your solution, you can add a file names ".sbtopts" at the root of your repository, next to the build.sbt file. In this file you can configure the JVM options. For instance you can add there: -J-Xmx2048M

I couldn't find the sbt documentation supporting my suggestion, but it works for me :)

Answer 2

I was able to work around this issue by going to Preferences -> Build, Execution, Deployment -> Build Tools -> sbt, then enabling sbt shell for builds and project reload.