Grails - Creating and Installing Plugins

Description

In Grails, plugin can be created by running the following command 

grails create-plugin myplugin

The above command will create plugin directory with name myplugin. In Grails, you should consider requirement of the plugin like, does the plugin requires a web environment or it can be used with other profiles. Depending on the requirement the profiles can be used like plugin or web-pluginprofile. The usage of profile with create-plugin command is shown below:

grails create-plugin myplugin --profile=plugin

You have to note that, the plugin name should not contain more than one capital letter. As it is a grails project (web profile), you can immediately test your plugin by running the following command: 

grails run-app

The structure of a Grails plugin should contain MypluginGrailsPlugin.groovy file in C:\myplugin\src\main\groovy\myplugin, otherwise it is not regarded as a plugin. The plugin class defines metadata about the plugin.

Table below shows additional information, that can be mentioned about the plugin:

S.N.Types & Description
1 
title

It indicates one-line heading of your plugin.
2 
grailsVersion

It shows the range of Grails that the plugin supports.
3 
author

It indicates plugin author’s name.
4 
authorEmail

It represents plugin author’s contact e-mail.
5 
developers

Any additional developers beyond the author specified above.
6 
description

A brief description of plugin and its features features.
7 
documentation

URL of the plugin’s documentation.
8 
license

This field indicates license of the plugin.
9 
issueManagement

This field indicates issue tracker of the plugin.
10 
scm

This field indicates source code management location of the plugin.

You can check the sample file Quartz Grails plugin for demonstration.

Installation

Plugins can be made available for application use by running the below command:

grails install

After running the above command, plugin will be installed in your local Maven cache. You have to declare a dependency of the plugin in your build.gradle file to use it in the application as shown below:

compile "org.grails.plugins:quartz:0.1"

You can setup the plugin as part of multi project build by following below steps:

  • Step 1: Create the application and the plugin

    Run the following commands for creating the application and the plugin:

    grails create-app myapplication
grails create-plugin multiproplugin
  • Step 2: Create a settings.gradle file

    Now create settings.gradle file in the project directory and place the following code in the file:

    include "myapplication", "multiproplugin"

    The directory structure should be as follows:

    grailsproject
  - settings.gradle
  - myapplication
    - build.gradle
  - multiproplugin
    - build.gradle
  • Step 3: Declare a project dependency on the plugin

    In build.gradle file of application folder, mention below code to declare a dependency on the plugin:.

    grails {
    plugins {
        compile project(':multiproplugin')
    }
}
  • Step 4: Run the application

    Now move into the app folder and run the application using below command.

    cd myapplication
$ grails run-app
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