Review of the Grails Gradle Plugin

UPDATE: Using the bootstrap configuration for the Tomcat plugin excludes it from the grails-war task.

See https://github.com/grails/grails-gradle-plugin/pull/43

Gradle support for Grails is maturing slowly and I must say that I can't wait for Grails 3.0. "Oh yeah, I'm excited!" :-), almost.

There are still few bits that I'm not clear about though in terms of how tight the integration will be, not specifically from an IDE usage perspective.

I watched a presentation from Luke Daley (aka alkemist) on Youtube(gr8conf 2013). It showcased the Gradle plugin for building Grails applications using the grails-gradle-plugin.

I was able to create a small POC and I want to share that experience with you.

General notes

Building a war and running Grails commands? Not a problem.
gradle grails-run-app
gradle grails-war

You can configure the Grails environment using -PgrailsEnv as command line argument.
-Dgrails.env= or -Pgrails.env= doesn't seem to work.

Arguments can be specified using -PgrailsArgs
gradle -PgrailsArgs='com.Domain' grails-create-domain-class

For some reason, the grails-gradle-plugin seems to require a closure with a Grails version specified twice (assuming that version is only used for bootstrapping the initial call??, while grailsVersion is used for building). I think that it should probably be consolidated...

grails {
  grailsVersion '2.2.3'
  version '2.2.3'
}

Below is a build.gradle file that does work for the Grails Gradle plugin 2.0.0-SNAPSHOT. Dump the file into some folder and run gradle init first.

buildscript {
  repositories {
    mavenCentral()
    maven { url 'http://repository.jboss.org/maven2/' }
    maven { url 'http://repo.grails.org/grails/repo' }
    maven { url 'http://repo.grails.org/grails/plugins' }
    maven { url 'http://repository.springsource.com/maven/bundles/release' }
    maven { url 'http://repository.springsource.com/maven/bundles/external' }
    maven { url 'http://repository.springsource.com/maven/libraries/release' }
    maven { url 'http://repository.springsource.com/maven/libraries/external' }
  }

  dependencies {
    classpath 'org.grails:grails-gradle-plugin:2.0.0-SNAPSHOT',
    'org.grails:grails-bootstrap:2.2.3' 
  }
}

version='0.0.1'

apply plugin: 'grails'

repositories {
  mavenCentral()
  maven { url 'http://repository.jboss.org/maven2/' }
  maven { url 'http://repo.grails.org/grails/repo' }
  maven { url 'http://repo.grails.org/grails/plugins' }
  maven { url 'http://repository.springsource.com/maven/bundles/release' }
  maven { url 'http://repository.springsource.com/maven/bundles/external' }
  maven { url 'http://repository.springsource.com/maven/libraries/release' }
  maven { url 'http://repository.springsource.com/maven/libraries/external' }  
}

grails {
  grailsVersion '2.2.3'
  version '2.2.3'
}

configurations {
  all {
    exclude module: 'commons-logging'
    exclude module: 'xml-apis'
  }
  test {
    exclude module: 'groovy-all'
  }
  compile {
    exclude module: 'hibernate'
  }
}

dependencies {
  compile( "org.grails:grails-crud:$grails.grailsVersion",
           'org.grails:grails-gorm:1.3.7')

  bootstrap "org.grails:grails-plugin-tomcat:$grails.grailsVersion"
}