On a server you may want to deploy your application as a war. How to build a war with spray-servlet Locally it's easiest to run without an application server. We include both the spray-servlet and spray-can dependencies:

name := "sprayApiExample"

version := "1.0"

scalaVersion := "2.11.6"

libraryDependencies ++= {
  val akkaV = "2.3.9"
  val sprayV = "1.3.3"
  Seq(
    "io.spray"            %%  "spray-can"     % sprayV,
    "io.spray"            %%  "spray-servlet" % sprayV,
    "io.spray"            %%  "spray-routing" % sprayV,
    "io.spray"            %%  "spray-json"    % "1.3.1", //has not been updated yet
    "com.typesafe.akka"   %%  "akka-actor"    % akkaV
  )
}

//This adds tomcat dependencies, you can also use jetty()
tomcat()

We make a trait with all the common functionality. We extend both SprayApiServlet and SprayApiCan from it.

import akka.actor.{ActorSystem, Props}
import akka.io.IO
import akka.pattern.ask
import akka.util.Timeout
import spray.can.Http
import spray.servlet.WebBoot
import scala.concurrent.duration._

trait SprayApi {
  implicit val system = ActorSystem("SprayApiApp")
  val apiActor = system.actorOf(Props[ApiActor], "apiActor")
}

//for use with spray-servlet
class SprayApiServlet extends WebBoot with SprayApi {
  override val serviceActor = apiActor
}

//for use with spray-can
object SprayApiCan extends App with SprayApi {
  implicit val timeout = Timeout(5.seconds)
  IO(Http) ? Http.Bind(apiActor, interface = "localhost", port = 8080)
}

You can see the whole example here.