How does conscript work? 

Conscript does less than you think, because the sbt launcher does more than you think. What?

What conscript does:

• Queries a GitHub project for launchconfigs (launcher configurations)
• Copies launchconfigs to your local filesystem, with a personalized boot path
• Creates scripts to execute the launch configurations

What sbt launcher does:

• Reads a given launchconfig
• Fetches needed dependencies on the first run
• Uses the same Ivy cache as sbt itself

So conscript just assumes a convention and helps you adhere to it. Suppose you’ve configured $CONSCRIPT_HOME to $HOME/.conscript.

Then $CONSCRIPT_HOME/boot is used as a boot directory for all. App launchconfigs are stored according to the GitHub project name and the script name, such as:

$CONSCRIPT_HOME/foundweekends/conscript/cs/launchconfig

And finally, shell scripts are created in $CONSCRIPT_BIN (default: $CONSCRIPT_HOME/bin) that reference launchconfigs, for example, ~/.conscript/bin/cs. This is how the shell script looks like on Mac:

#!/bin/sh
java -jar /Users/foo/.conscript/sbt-launch.jar \
  @/Users/foo/.conscript/foundweekends/conscript/cs/launchconfig "$@"

Once the shell script is created, now it’s up to the sbt launcher to carry out the actual work of fetching artifacts and running the app.