grails-build-x

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Experimental Gradle build for Grails

There is already a simple Gradle plugin that enables you to build Grails projects: grails-gradle-plugin. However, that one delegates most of the work to the Grails build system.

This project is a new, experimental Gradle plugin that builds Grails projects natively, without using the Grails build system at all. This makes for a more powerful and flexible build. It also give Grails plugins much more flexibility when interacting with the build.

The rationale behind this project is that the Grails build system is gradually doing more and more of the stuff that Gradle already handles out of the box. Not only that, but a Grails project is really just a WAR project with a unique directory structure. Gradle's concept of source sets now means that the directory structure can be handled by the standard Gradle tasks.

By using Gradle, we can greatly simplify the Grails build system while taking advantage of a very powerful API.

Building the plugin

In order to build and package the plugin, you need at least Gradle 0.9, which may mean grabbing a snapshot:

http://teamcity.jetbrains.com/viewLog.html?buildId=lastSuccessful&buildTypeId=bt41&tab=artifacts

When asked to log in, simply select "Login as guest".

Once you have Gradle installed, all you have to do is run

gradle assemble

from the project's root directory.

Using the plugin

At the moment, the plugin is not published to a repository, so trying it out is tricky. Here's how I do it: create a Gradle build script in the root of your Grails project that contains

buildscript { repositories { mavenCentral() flatDir dirs: "/path/to/grails-build-x/build/libs" }

  dependencies {
      classpath "org.grails:grails-bootstrap:1.2.0", "org.grails:grails-core:1.2.0", ":grails-build-x:"
  }

}

apply id: 'grails-x'

You should also install the Jetty plugin from the package in the root of this project. Then run 'gradle run'. Lots of stuff doesn't work yet, but it will come.