Installing Grails from Source

Having converted the customer-facing pages of Wotif.com from a Freemarker/WebWork/EJB stack to a Grails/Spring3 stack earlier this year, I’m now officially a huge Grails fan. In setting up a new dev box, I wanted to install it – but who wants to install a download, huh? I wanted to build it from source (you can tell I’m a former Gentoo user!). Here’s what I did.

1. Clone the Git repository: git clone git://github.com/grails/grails-core.git
2. Checkout the version tag to install: git checkout tags/v2.0.0.M2
3. Add the checkout as an environment variable – $GRAILS_HOME
4. Add ${GRAILS_HOME}/bin to my path
5. Build the app – ./gradlew install

These steps all courtesy of the Grails developer documentation – except the last bit. It’s changed with v2.

On a more serious question: why build it from source? Well, this is for a milestone build, after all – there may be bugs, and having the source handy could be useful. Also, being Git, if I want to patch it, I can share those patches easily via GitHub. And finally, why not?

Author: Robert Watkins

My name is Robert Watkins. I am a software developer and have been for over 20 years now. I currently work for people, but my opinions here are in no way endorsed by them (which is cool; their opinions aren’t endorsed by me either). My main professional interests are in Java development, using Agile methods, with a historical focus on building web based applications. I’m also a Mac-fan and love my iPhone, which I’m currently learning how to code for. I live and work in Brisbane, Australia, but I grew up in the Northern Territory, and still find Brisbane too cold (after 22 years here). I’m married, with two children and one cat. My politics are socialist in tendency, my religious affiliation is atheist (aka “none of the above”), my attitude is condescending and my moral standing is lying down. View all posts by Robert Watkins