Grails + Eclipse Quick Tip #1

More Automated Builds

here is a little hint on how to make building your Grails apps from within Eclipse a little less explicit. The goal is to avoid being asked to manually issue a “grails package” after each re-build. Plus, if you followed my hints on how to let Grails and Eclipse compile to the same directory structure, you won’t need to issue “grails clean” anymore. Simply running Project –> Clean… and then running the Grails launcher will suffice for successful compilation and deployment if you follow these instructions.

1. Go to you project properties and select the Builders entry. You should see two builders: Groovy builder and Java builder.
2. If you haven’t yet configured an external tools launcher for a “grails package”, click New…, otherwise import that builder
3. If you have to create the builder, set the following fields:
   • set Location to the folder where the Grails executables reside on your system
   • set Working Directory to ${workspace_loc:/your_project_name}
   • set Arguments to “package”
   • In the Build Options tab, check the fields After a “Clean” and During manual builds
     
4. move the new builder to the bottom

I would also advice to create a keyboard shortcut to issue a manual build. For myself, I reassigned Ctrl+B to “Build project” instead of “Build all”.

When you now “Clean” your project and run the “run-app” launcher (I assume you have one!), Eclipse will first build your project and package it for deployment. The packaging is conditional though: if the sources are up-to-date, the new builder will be excluded when launching the app.