Will not launch outside of project directory (no sbt.version)

[sloshy]

I have a giter8 template that I want to use with sbt new. To do so, I invoke the command in my base project directory which does not have a build.properties file, and there is no inferred sbt version. For example, this will fail in my projects directory:

rpeters$ sbt --version
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.Exception: Don't know what Scala version should be used for sbt version ''

A workaround is to manually specify the version like so: sbt -Dsbt.version=1.3.8 '<command>'

[dwijnand]

Fails fast and explicitly when using coursier/sbt-extras because that looks, checks and uses the sbt.version in project/build.properties.