Setup IntelliJ 9 for Lift Framework Development
This small tutorial may seem overly simplified but I think that a lot of newbies out there will find it helpful. I also would consider using sbt instead of just maven but this tutorial covers just maven.
I have been developing using Lift for a little over a year now and I found the IDE choices grim. I tried Eclipse, Netbeans and IntelliJ. My clear favorite is IntelliJ. It does not specifically support the Lift Framework but it does have great support for Scala and Maven. Here’s how I set things up.
Download and Install Maven 2.2.1: http://maven.apache.org/download.html
You MUST set your M2_HOME environment variable and you must make sure the mvn executable is in your execution path. Methods to accomplish this vary from system to system.
Go to a directory where you want to create your Lift app and run something like this(varies depending on archetype)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | mvn archetype:generate -U \ -DarchetypeGroupId=net.liftweb \ -DarchetypeArtifactId=lift-archetype-basic \ -DarchetypeVersion=2.0 \ -DremoteRepositories=http://scala-tools.org/repo-releases \ -Dversion=0.1 \ -DgroupId=com.morroni.jagger -DartifactId=store-jagger |
Download and install intelliJ 9.02 Community Edition or Ultimate: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/
Open up IntelliJ and goto the menu item IntelliJ->Preferences. Choose the Plugins menu on the left and click the Available tab at the top. Type “scala” to search for the relevant plugins. Highlight the Scala plugin and click the little disk/arrow icon to install them.

Open up IntelliJ and goto File->New Project
Choose Import project from external model and click Next

Enter the location of the folder where you generated your maven project and click next

Select both profile radio boxes and click Next

Make sure the only Maven project available is selected and click Next

Click Finish.
When you are ready to run your project, right click on it and select Run “store-jagger [jetty:run]”

Open up a web browser and go to http://localhost:8080

