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Page: GrailsDevEnvironment, Version:1

Setting up a Grails development environment

So, you'd like to delve into the Grails source code? Whatever reason you have for doing so, you first need to set yourself up so that you can easily run and debug with the source code version of Grails. Where to start?

Pre-requisites

You won't go far without some essential tools and libraries, but to be honest you probably already have all of them:

  • JDK (preferably 1.5+)
  • Ant
  • Subversion client
In fact, you don't even need Ant since Grails includes a copy in its "ant" directory, but it's a good idea to set up Ant independently.

Grails

Once you have all the pre-requisite packages installed, it's time to get hold of the Grails source code. Typically you will want to get hold of "trunk", but on occasion there will be a branch that you need to work with instead. At the time of writing, "trunk" contains the "1.0.x" code while the branch "GRAILS_1_1" contains the Grails 1.1 work.

Let's say that you want to get hold of just the Grails source code for "trunk". All you have to do is check it out from the Codehaus repository: 

svn co http://svn.codehaus.org/grails/trunk/grails
The above will create a "grails" directory in your current working directory populated with the project source. If you want to work with a branch instead, ask on the mailing list for the URL to use.

So, you have the source code. What's next?