sbt/notes/about.markdown

coursier is a dependency resolver / fetcher à la Maven / Ivy, entirely rewritten from scratch in Scala. It aims at being fast and easy to embed in other contexts. Its very core (core module) aims at being extremely pure, and only requires to be fed external data (Ivy / Maven metadata) via a monad.

It handles fancy Maven features like

• POM inheritance,
• dependency management,
• import scope,
• properties,
• etc.

and is able to fetch metadata and artifacts from both Maven and Ivy repositories.

Compared to the default dependency resolution of SBT, it adds:

• downloading of artifacts in parallel,
• better offline mode - one can safely work with snapshot dependencies if these are in cache (SBT tends to try and fail if it cannot check for updates),
• non obfuscated cache (cache structure just mimicks the URL it caches),
• no global lock (no "Waiting for ~/.ivy2/.sbt.ivy.lock to be available").

From the command-line, it also has:

• a launcher, able to launch apps distributed via Maven / Ivy repositories,
• a bootstrap generator, able to generate stripped launchers of these apps.

Lastly, it can be used programmatically via its API and has a Scala JS demo.