Create standalone application with grails

Question

I wonder if there is a tool which creates a demoable version of my grails projects. Something which I can distribute on a CD or USB stick which will run on every environment.

Something which

• comes with one shell script to start the app
• searches for a free server port on the system (no error message if 8080 is already in use)
• starts a jetty server
• starts the standard browser with my application

Does anybody know of such a tool?

Answer 1

Check out the standalone plugin it makes it a lot easier to distribute a demo version of your Grails app.

"The Standalone plugin builds a runnable JAR file with an embedded war built from your application and an embedded Tomcat 7 instance. This allows you to build a single archive that can be run on any computer with Java 5 or higher by running java -jar standalone.jar. This can be convenient for demos or even very lightweight installs of low-traffic Grails applications."

Full docs for the standalone plugin are here

To prepare the jar file...

grails -Dgrails.env=demo build-standalone our_cool_demo.jar

To run the Grails app (the port is specified as a parameter)...

java -jar /path/to/jar_name.jar cool_demo localhost 9000

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Update:

There are actually 2 Grails standalone plugins:

1. The 'standalone' plugin described above which is based on Tomcat7
2. The 'jetty-standalone' plugin which is based on Jetty and works in a similar way

There are also some options based on Hudson and the Winstone project but there isn't a Grails plugin. Here are some links with further information: Build executable war using grails, maven and jetty, Executable WARs with Jetty and Winstone

Answer 2

Best thing that comes to mind is using a Linux distro on a USB stick with grails installed. You can export the application as a WAR file, then create a script containing grails prod run-war to execute on boot. Finally, you can open up firefox with firefox localhost:port#/AppName

The only downside with this option is you need to boot from the stick and that will create a bit of delay time. However, the advantages are that you only have to worry about supporting one OS, no port scanning on startup and simplicity.

Answer 3

The answer proposed by Chris does not work for my, but it provided me a good starting point: It seems that it isn't too hard to create such a standalone app:

• jetty is a good starting point: just drop the jetty files on a USB stick and deploy your grails app by dropping the .war file in the webapps directory of jetty
• create a small groovy script which searches for two (!) free ports. You'll need the second to stop the server again
• the groovy script can start and stop the server
• compile the script in order to avoid having to install groovy on the target machine

that's it. I guess I'll post more details when I find some more time...