Play Framework: How to create a new play application

Creating a Play application is pretty easy and fully managed by the Play command line utility. This encourages a standard project layout across all Play applications.

Open a new command line and enter:

$ play new myProject

The play new myProject command creates a new directory myProject/ and populates it with a series of files and directories. The most important are as follows.

• app/ contains the application’s core, split between models, controllers and views directories. This is the directory where .java source files live.
• conf/ contains all the application’s configuration files, especially the main application.conf file, the routes definition files and the messages files used for internationalization.
• project/ contains the build scripts. The build system is based on sbt. But a new play application comes with a default build script that will just work fine for our application.
• public/ contains all the publicly available resources, which includes JavaScript, stylesheets and images directories.
• test/ contains all the application tests. Tests can be written as JUnit tests.

Because Play uses UTF-8 as the single encoding, it’s very important that all text files hosted in these directories use this encoding. Make sure to configure your text editor accordingly. In the windows system the editor configuration must be ANSI encode.