How to see dependency tree in sbt?

I am trying to inspect the SBT dependency tree as described in the documentation:

sbt inspect tree clean

But I get this error:

[error] inspect usage:
[error]   inspect [uses|tree|definitions] <key>   Prints the value for 'key', the defining scope, delegates, related definitions, and dependencies.
[error]
[error] inspect
[error]        ^

What is wrong? Why doesn't SBT build the tree?

If you want to actually view the library dependencies (as you would with Maven) rather than the task dependencies (which is what inspect tree displays), then you'll want to use the sbt-dependency-graph plugin.

Add the following to your project/plugins.sbt (or the global plugins.sbt).

addSbtPlugin("net.virtual-void" % "sbt-dependency-graph" % "0.9.2")

Then you have access to the dependencyTree command, and others.

When run from the command line, each argument sent to sbt is supposed to be a command, so sbt inspect tree cleanwill:

• run the inspect command,
• then run the tree command,
• then the clean command

This obviously fails, since inspect needs an argument. This will do what you want:

sbt "inspect tree clean"