Archive for the Category 'tomcat'

New grails-standalone plugin

Saturday, July 09th, 2011

I noticed a while back looking at open Grails issues that there was an interesting one about running a Grails application as a standalone jar, GRAILS-99. Jenkins has this option and uses Winstone but I wasn’t able to get it completely working with a Grails application. It would start up and serve the index GSP but controller-based actions just showed a blank page. It might have been fixable, but the project hasn’t been updated since 2008 and I didn’t want to invest a lot of time on this so I did it a bit more manually using Tomcat.

I took the same approach as Winstone, i.e. creating a JAR with a Main-class entry in the manifest for a class that extracts an embedded WAR file to a temporary folder and uses a servlet container to host the application. I’m using Tomcat 7.0.16 and borrowed a lot of code from the Tomcat plugin. There’s a Gant script (build-standalone) which builds a WAR (or uses an existing one if specified) and builds the JAR by expanding the five Tomcat jars and adding the WAR and the launcher class.

There are a few configuration options, but the simplest workflow is to run

grails build-standalone

in your project directory, which creates target/standalone.jar, and then run

java -jar standalone.jar

and the application will be running at http://localhost:8080.

The plugin portal page is here, the full docs are here and the source is here. Report issues and suggestions on the User mailing list.

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