Grails Maven Plugin

Hi, this feature would also improve the IDE integration. On all Java projects so far I used ant extensively also from Eclipse and Netbeans.

In continuous build and integration environments, the ability to use Ant for the grails command line tasks would go a long way towards Grails integrating more smoothly, without the requirement for the continuous integration environment to call out of Java to issue shell commands.

We didn't add it because and probably should have, but its pretty simple to do with an Ant macro (no need for a specific Ant task):

<macrodef name="grails">
     <attribute name="grailsStarter"
default="org.codehaus.groovy.grails.cli.support.GrailsStarter"/>
     <attribute name="grailsScriptRunner"
default="org.codehaus.groovy.grails.cli.GrailsScriptRunner"/>
     <attribute name="command" default="help"/>
     <sequential>
         <java fork="true" classname="@{grailsStarter}" dir="${basedir}">
             <env key="GRAILS_HOME" value="${grails.home}"/>
             <env key="JAVA_OPTS" value="-XX:MaxPermSize=512m -Xmx1024m"/>
             <sysproperty key="grails.home" value="${grails.home}"/>
             <sysproperty key="groovy.starter.conf"
value="${grails.home}/conf/groovy-starter.conf"/>

             <sysproperty key="disable.auto.recompile" value="false"/>
             <sysproperty key="server.port" value="7070"/>
             <sysproperty key="enable.jndi" value="true"/>
             <sysproperty key="base.dir" value="${basedir}" />

             <!-- <sysproperty key="tools.jar" value="C:\Program
Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_09\lib\tools.jar"/> -->

             <classpath>
                 <pathelement
location="${grails.home}/lib/groovy-all-1.5.4.jar"/>
                 <pathelement
location="${grails.home}/dist/grails-cli-1.0.1.jar"/>
             </classpath>

             <arg line="--main
org.codehaus.groovy.grails.cli.GrailsScriptRunner"/>
             <arg line="--conf ${grails.home}/conf/groovy-starter.conf"/>
             <arg line="--classpath
${grails.home}/lib/groovy-all-1.5.4.jar:${grails.home}/ldist/grails-cli-1.0.1.jar."/>

             <arg value="@{command}"/>
         </java>

     </sequential>
 </macrodef>

This can then be used like:

<grails command="run-app" />

What about providing an Ant file containing this macro in Grails' distribution?

This would allow users to use <import file="/path/to/grail/ant/util/file.xml"/> and then just use the macro. Beside the saved macro definition users could be sure to have it in sync with the Grails version they use.

Graeme, I've tried the macro you've provided (thanks). I'm able to successfully run clean and war tasks, but when test-app runs it cannot find any of my unit tests (which are in test/unit, without any packages). Is there additional configuration required to include the test sources in the classpath for this macro?

I looked into why the test-app command would not find and execute the tests.

The result I found was the --classpath line is an incorrect path in many ways.

<arg line="--classpath ${grails.home}/lib/groovy-all-1.5.4.jar:${grails.home}/ldist/grails-cli-1.0.1.jar."/>

1. the ldist directory does not exist, it should be dist
2. the current basedir should be included as . but there is no path separator at the end it should be :.
3. the path separator is not correct for windows

Here is the proper format for windows

<arg line="--classpath ${grails.home}/lib/groovy-all-1.5.4.jar;${grails.home}/dist/grails-cli-1.0.1.jar;."/>

but I would fix this by defining a path inside the <macrodef><sequential> as

<path id="grails_cp">
<pathelement location="${grails.home}/lib/groovy-all-1.5.4.jar"/>
<pathelement location="${grails.home}/dist/grails-cli-1.0.1.jar"/>
<pathelement location="${basedir}"/>
</path>

then use this path like this:

<arg line="--classpath ${gails_cp}"/>

ant will create the proper path for your OS.

Grails 1.0.3 will come with a "grails-macros.xml" file in "$GRAILS_HOME/src/grails". Please try it out. You can even grab it from svn if you want and use it with an older version of Grails - you will just have to update the classpaths.

In the macro,

<!-- <sysproperty key="tools.jar" value="C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_09\lib\tools.jar"/> -->

If I don't uncomment the above line, it will complain that it cannot find the javac and say JAVA_HOME point to jdk's jre directory.

However, for my environment I can make it work without hard coding the path by doing

<sysproperty key="tools.jar" value="${java.home}/../lib/tools.jar"/>

There is already the macro.xml file now, so closing this issue

With the work done for Maven integration, a Grails Ant task should be fairly straightforward to implement and work in a more flexible manner.

Note to self: update the template "build.xml" for Grails applications so that it uses the Ant task.

The Ant task is now done and "grails.org" has an Ant build that uses it in combination with Ivy. I'll still have to provide a decent template build file.

Is there a different issue for the template build file? Otherwise I think this should be re-opened

Created GRAILS-3812 for that.