My Grails Workflow: New Project Setup

Configuration changes

Build Config Changes

• add organization's artifact repository to buildConfig.groovy
  

  mavenRepo https://my.url.org/nexus
  mavenRepo https://my.url.org/artifactory
  
  

• Update all the plugins in buildConfig.groovy. Some of these plugins mature faster than the Grails releases and need to be updated when starting a new project.
  • Add (uncomment) cached resources - creates a hash of resources and sets expire headers so that your resources will not be downloaded over and over, helping to speed up your application
  • Add (uncomment) zipped resources - gzips the static resources in your application
  • Add build-test-data plugin - provides data that meets your domain constraints so you can concentrate on data under test
  • Add fixtures plugin - allows you to define dummy data for tests and development in the form of spring beans
  • Add spock plugin, if necessary - BDD Testing framework that makes tests much more expressive

      dependencies {
          test "org.spockframework:spock-grails-support:0.7-groovy-2.0" //Required for Grails v2.2+
      }
  
      plugins {
          runtime ":hibernate:$grailsVersion"
          runtime ":jquery:1.8.3"
          runtime ":resources:1.1.6"
          runtime ":zipped-resources:1.0"
          runtime ":cached-resources:1.0"
          runtime ":database-migration:1.3.2"
  
          build ":tomcat:$grailsVersion"
         
          compile ":cache-headers:1.1.5"
          compile ":cache:1.0.1"
          compile ":build-test-data:2.0.5"
  
          test (":spock:0.7") {
                  exclude "spock-grails-support"
          }
          test ':fixtures:1.2'

      }

Datasource Changes

• Remove production block from datasource.groovy  (leaving the development and testing blocks).  I would remove all content, however, it appears that the database migration plugin has problems using alternative datasource configuration files when performing diffs/updates (http://jira.grails.org/browse/GPDATABASEMIGRATION-63)
• Add <my app>-config.groovy to root directory for externalized configuration
• Add /*-config.groovy to .gitignore to exclude it from the code repo.

Work Directory Change
This one is from Programming Grails by Burt Beckwith. Make target your work directory. This moves generated files, compiled classes, and installed plugins under the target directory and allows you to delete all of it by removing the target directory. This can help when Grails gets out of sync with your source code.
Change

  grails.project.class.dir = "target/classes"
  grails.project.test.class.dir = "target/test-classes"
  grails.project.test.reports.dir = "target/test-reports"

To

  grails.project.work.dir = 'target'

Setup/Preparation for Future Work

Front-End Development Preparation

• Create and configure .editorconfig (This is not playing well with Intellij)
• Disable caching, zipping, etc in development mode. This will allow you to make edits to the css and javascript while debugging/testing

    development {
      grails.resources.debug = true
    }
  

Database Migrations
Get the resources and artifacts prepared for the future. I like to setup the changelog prior to creating any domain classes.  This makes changelog.groovy  a simple list of includes.

dbm-generate-changelog changelog.groovy