Command Line Tools

The Grails console

Grails ships with an extended version of the regular Groovy console. To run the console simply type the following command from the root of a Grails project:

grails console

The console is a Swing GUI interface that lets you type arbitrary commands and execute them. It is a good way to learn Grails and try out the various dynamic finders available on your domain model.

The Grails interactive shell

In addition to the console there is the interactive shell. It works similar to the console but with a text UI only. To run the shell simply type the following command from the root of a Grails project:

grails shell

There are instructions on how to use it when it loads, but essentially you type in the commands you want to execute separated by carriage returns and you then type go followed by a carriage return to execute the commands.

General usage

Both console and shell are useful for working interactively with your Grails application:

• find domain objects with the help of dynamic finder methods
• call mutator methods on domain objects once you have a reference to them
• save() or delete() domain objects like you would otherwise do in a controller
• … _more to come here_

Below is a transcript of an example session with a grails shell for a fictious book store application.

class Book {
	String title
	String author
	String description
}

groovy:000> new Book(title:'Grails in Action', author:'Glen Smith',
groovy:001> description: 'Manning Early Access').save()
===> Book : 1
groovy:000> new Book(title:'The definitve Guide to Grails', author:'Graeme Rocher',
groovy:001> description: 'First book by the Project Lead of Grails').save()
===> Book : 2
groovy:000> Book.findAllByTitleLike('Grails%').title
===> [Grails in Action]
groovy:000> Book.findAllByTitleLike('%Grails%').title
===> [Grails in Action, The definitve Guide to Grails]
groovy:000> Book.findAllByAuthorLike('G%').author
===> [Glen Smith, Graeme Rocher]

.... more to come here (example with associations)

Packaging a WAR

To package a WAR file for deployment onto an application server you can do:

grails war

By default this will package for a production environment you can change this by doing:

grails test war // for test enviroment
grails dev war  // for development environment
grails prod war // for production

If you want to package for X other environment you can do:

grails -Dgrails.env=blah war

A full list of the available targets is in the Command Line

Development

If you are a developer working with the Grails application you may be interested in how to debug it remotely. Starting Grails in this manner will make it listen on por 5005 so that you can connect your favorite remote debugger to it.

grails-debug run-app