Grails Goodness: Cleaning Up
When we use for example the compile
or war
command Grails will create files and stores them by default in the project’s working directory. The location of the project working directory can be customized in our grails-app/conf/BuildConfig.groovy
configuration file. We remove the generated files with the Grails clean
command. This command will remove all compiled class files, the WAR file, cached scripts and test reports. But this doesn’t remove all files in the project working directory. For example plugins or a temporary web.xml
file, which are stored in the project working directory are not removed. We must use the clean-all
command to also remove those files from the project working directory completely.
Let’s take a look at the default settings in our grails-app/conf/BuildConfig.groovy
configuration file when we create a new Grails application:
// File: grails-app/conf/BuildConfig.groovy ... grails.project.class.dir = "target/classes" grails.project.test.class.dir = "target/test-classes" grails.project.test.reports.dir = "target/test-reports" grails.project.work.dir = "target/work" ...
After we run the war
command we see the following contents in our target
directory:
$ grails war | Compiling 10 source files | Compiling 142 source files | Done creating WAR target/cleanCmd-0.1.war $ ls target/ classes cleanCmd-0.1.war stacktrace.log work
Let’s first run the clean
command and check the contents of the target
directory again:
$ grails clean | Application cleaned. $ ls target/ stacktrace.log work
Notice the target/work
directory still exists. We now run clean-all
and examine the contents of the target
directory:
$ grails clean-all | Application cleaned. $ ls target/ stacktrace.log
Now the work
directory is removed as well.
We can also write our own scripts to for example only remove the generated WAR file with a clean command. With the following script we add the command clean-war
to our application, which will delete the generated WAR file from our project:
// File: scripts/CleanWar.groovy includeTargets << grailsScript("_GrailsClean") setDefaultTarget("cleanWarFile")
We can use the targets cleanCompiledSources
, cleanTestReports
and cleanWarFile
in our own scripts.
- Code written with Grails 2.3.5