Before installing Scala, you want to be sure to have Java's JDK 1.7 installed on your machine.

For any operating system, you can also download the binaries from the Scala language website and add the Scala interpreter and the Scala compiler to your path as explained on Scala-Lang.org. Both Mac and Linux operating systems offer installation methods using package managers.

On Mac OSX

The simplest way to install Scala is using a package utility such as Homebrew or MacPorts.

On Linux

The simplest way to install Scala on Linux is via the package manager.

Under Ubuntu or Debian, this will be apt-get:

sudo apt-get install scala

Under Fedora, this will be yum:

sudo yum install scala

Other Linux distributions may have a different or no package manager at all, in which case you will likely need to install Scala manually. These instructions can help you accomplish this.