Grails 3 has been released with a ton of new features.
If you’re used to adding a new Grails distribution in Eclipse or Groovy/Grails Tool Suite, you’ve might have experienced that your good old IDE might not support Grails 3 projects right out of the box.
You might be missing:
- Grails 3 support at all 🙂
- Gradle support
- Groovy 2.4 support
Here’s how I think you can fix some of these things.
Grails 3 support
As you regularly do with new Grails distributions is to add it in GGTS under Preferences > Groovy > Grails. But dang!…it doesn’t recognize the grails-3.0.x-directory you just unzipped a minute ago.
No worries! We have Gradle now.
Gradle is the new Grails 3 build system, in favor of Gant. If you’ve created e.g. the helloworld-application as used in the Getting Started section of the manual, you see a few files like build.gradle and gradle.properties.
Because of this we don’t need a specialized IDE plugin perse, since existing Gradle tooling can do the trick! So we skip adding a Grails 3 distribution and we look for…
Gradle support
It is possible that GGTS doesn’t know to import a Grails 3 project into your workspace, because of missing Gradle support. You can:
Generate Eclipse/GGTS…
- … files with
gradlew eclipse. - This will generate .project and .classpath which will allow you to “import it as an existing project” into your workspace
or install Gradle support
- Open Eclipse Marketplace, search for “gradle”
- Choose e.g. the Gradle IDE pack or just the Gradle Integration plugin
- Now you can find and import your project too
In GGTS your Grails 3 project is just a “regular” Gradle project.
The above screenshot is possibly an idealized view – it might as well that you have some red markers! I did.
Grails 3 comes with Groovy 2.4, and if you don’t have the correct version set, you get:
Groovy: compiler mismatch Project level is: 2.4 Workspace level is 2.3
Groovy compiler level expected by the project does not match workspace compiler level.
It’s similar as when you had to install Groovy 2.3 into GGTS 🙂 You can fix the project level to 2.3 but then you get
Groovy:Unexpected problem with AST transform: The Spock compiler plugin cannot execute because Spock 1.0.0-groovy-2.4 is not compatible with Groovy 2.3.10. For more information, see http://versioninfo.spockframework.org
You’ll have to get…
Groovy support
Assuming you don’t already have it, we have to install the Groovy Compiler 2.4 Feature into GGTS.
1. Go to Help > Install New Software and use the update site http://dist.springsource.org/snapshot/GRECLIPSE/e4.4/
2. Select the Groovy 2.4 compiler and Next.
3. If there’s a conflict, just press on – it’ll install Groovy 2.4 next to the other versions.
4. Continue all the way. Finish, restart.
5. Switch the compiler for the workspace. Go to Preferences > Groovy > Compiler and switch to 2.4.3.
Done.
Happy programming!
