How do you manage developing with multiple versions of Grails using Windows?

Question

We\'ve been using Grails for a little while now and have been through a few Grails versions now. We don\'t always want to migrate our \'older\' apps immediately but often us

Answer 1

Some answers are outdated.

Seems that the best option nowadays is SDKMAN!:

SDKMAN! installs smoothly on Mac OSX, Linux, WLS, Cygwin, Solaris and FreeBSD. We also support Bash and ZSH shells.

Is also possible to install on Windows, but SDKMAN "can not be installed natively on Windows and requires WLS, Cygwin or MSYS+MinGW".

After that, you can choose the Grails SDK and which version you want. For example:

sdk install grails 1.3.7

Answer 2

It's now MUCH much later, and GVM is not the tool it once was. Instead, I use SDKMAN (https://sdkman.io/) and, with Windows getting some linux-like tooling, or using Cygwin, etc. it's installable on Windows.

------ OLD answer below ------

GVM is a tool for unix/mac environments to manage Groovy/Gradle/Grails/more versions, and someone finally made a Windows equivalent called Posh-gvm (short for Power-shell GVM). It's very useful and easy to use to download and configure your environment for whichever version of these tools you want to use at any point in time.

If you're using an IDE, posh-gvm is still a great way to download/install the new versions as they come out, and your IDE can point into the posh-gvm install directories.

Answer 3

Check out this link, it explains exactly how to do that using cygwin and mapping several aliases.

Also, learn how the plugins directory work and replicate it several times for each version of Grails. I also use global plugins for the ones I use often, like tomcat, hibernate, dbUtil, console, etc.

Say you want to switch between 1.1 and 1.2M4 - you could have those directories setup with the plugins you are using:

c:\Users\username\.grails\1.2-M4\projects\projectname\plugins

c:\Users\username\.grails\1.1.1\projects\projectname\plugins

Then, take applications.groovy and make several copies, like

application.groovy.1.1
application.groovy.1.2M4

Now, to switch, you just need to rename the application.groovy.X to application.groovy and you are good to go (after running grails clean of course):

grails1.1 run-app 
grails12M4 run-app

Lastly, there are other differences between versions (i.e. new 1.2 is introducing dependencies DSL), but most of the time things are backwards compatible enough that you can come up with a common denominator.

Answer 4

IntelliJ allows you to specify which version of Grails to apply as a per-project facet configuration. The Eclipse plugin has yet to achieve this level of abstraction.

Answer 5

I have a batch file, that looks like below.

@ECHO OFF

if "%1"=="231" goto grails231
if "%1"=="232" goto grails232
if "%1"=="233" goto grails233
if "%1"=="234" goto grails234


goto end

:grails231
set GRAILS_HOME=F:\softwares\grails-2.3.1
set PATH=%GRAILS_HOME%\bin;%PATH%
goto end

:grails232
set GRAILS_HOME=F:\softwares\grails-2.3.2
set PATH=%GRAILS_HOME%\bin;%PATH%
goto end


:grails233
set GRAILS_HOME=F:\softwares\grails-2.3.3
set PATH=%GRAILS_HOME%\bin;%PATH%
goto end

:grails234
set GRAILS_HOME=F:\softwares\grails-2.3.4
set PATH=%GRAILS_HOME%\bin;%PATH%
goto end

:end

It can be run like 'setgrails 233' and it will set the grails 2.3.3

Answer 6

On Linux/Mac, GVM is a fantastic tool for installing and working with multiple versions of Grails, Groovy, etc. You can't use GVM itself on Windows¹, but there is a clone posh-gvm that will run under Powershell on Windows.

1. AFAIK this is because Windows doesn't support symlinks