I have near zero knowledge of Maven/Ivy but know that these technologies are behind SBT's ability to download and manage libraries automatically.
When I was trying to generate an IntelliJ Idea project from SBT it (Idea or the generator plug-in) has failed to find cached libraries stored in the common Ivy 2 cache. I've solved the problem by setting up the SBT project to use the old scheme storing downloaded libraries under the project directory. Another project of mine uses old SBT version which does it this way by default. In both cases I use clean command to remove library binaries before backing up and update after to download all the libraries again. Which means I download the same library files many times.
The question is how to set up a local repository to cache the libraries so that SBT update will download the libraries from the local cache if available? Would be nice to use the existing ~/.ivy2/cache directory for the cache if possible.
I tend to believe this is probably fairly simple when you have at least basic Ivy 2 knowledge.