Installing Play Framework 2.1 on Windows

The Play Framework is probably one of the few web frameworks that installs and works pretty well on Windows. I started web development with Django, but I had to learn Python and Django at the same time, and the documentation was not so good as they said it was. So I decided to leverage my Java experience and use Play. And since Play supports both Java and Scala I could refactor and move to Scala at any time.

On this guide I’ll just refer to these variables and not their absolute paths:

• %JAVA_HOME%, where Java installer installs JDK, e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.7.0_25\bin
• %PLAY_HOME%, where you extract the Play! Framework files, e.g. C:\Play\play-2.1.2

To install Play just follow these steps:

1. First, you should follow the default steps from the official guide.
2. Uninstall previous JDK. Download and install the most recent JDK. Don’t forget to (1) create a %JAVA_HOME% system variable and (2) append that variable to your PATH environment variable.
3. Extract the Play! Framework install package (zip) to %PLAY_HOME%. Attention: you must have read and write permissions on that folder.
4. Open a command line, go to %PLAY_HOME%, type play and enter. That should start the Play! installer. Wait for the installation to finish. Don’t forget to add %PLAY_HOME% to your PATH environment variable.
5. To test if everything is ok, open a command line, then execute java -version, then javac -version, then play help. Check the outputs of each command and you’ll know if it worked.