Documentation: How to connect to the server

[martijnhoekstra]

I'm working on a scala lsp client to connect to sbt server. I'd also like to be able to connect to metals, but I can't find any documentation on how to start the metals server, and how to connect to it (address, wire protocol and initialization object requirements)

[gabro]

There's currently no documentation on this, but your best bet is to use the vscode extension implementation as a reference.

Here it is: https://github.com/scalameta/metals/blob/master/vscode-extension/src/extension.ts#L17-L54

It's in TypeScript, but it should be pretty straightforward to follow.

Hope that helps.

[laughedelic]

@martijnhoekstra which editor/IDE are you targeting? For the sbt server there is a VSCode plugin in the sbt repo: https://github.com/sbt/sbt/tree/1.x/vscode-sbt-scala (there are also writeups about integrating it with Neovim and Sublime).

And for Metals, besides the VSCode plugin there is a launcher bash-script: https://github.com/scalameta/metals/blob/master/bin/start-server.sh (which is a bit outdated, I think)

It should be basically just running this command (assuming you have coursier around):

coursier launch \
  --repository bintray:scalameta/maven \
  org.scalameta:metals_2.12:$version \
  --main scala.meta.metals.Main

• IIRC it should be run from the project's directory
• $version can be 0.1-SNAPSHOT for the locally published Metals or any version published to Bintray (current latest is 977c902b)
• it uses stdin/out to communicate.

[martijnhoekstra]

@laughedelic I'm trying to target Visual Studio (non-code) through a VSIX extension.

[olafurpg]

Superseded by #217

[olafurpg]

Opened #256 to document how to connect to metals from a new editor client