(Quick Reference)

15.2 Plugin Repositories - Reference Documentation

Authors: Graeme Rocher, Peter Ledbrook, Marc Palmer, Jeff Brown, Luke Daley, Burt Beckwith, Lari Hotari

Version: 2.3.8

15.2 Plugin Repositories

Distributing Plugins in the Grails Central Plugin Repository

The preferred way to distribute plugin is to publish to the official Grails Central Plugin Repository. This will make your plugin visible to the list-plugins command:

grails list-plugins

which lists all plugins that are in the central repository. Your plugin will also be available to the plugin-info command:

grails plugin-info [plugin-name]

which prints extra information about it, such as its description, who wrote, etc.

If you have created a Grails plugin and want it to be hosted in the central repository, you'll find instructions for getting an account on this wiki page.

When you have access to the Grails Plugin repository, install the Release Plugin by declaring it as a 'build' scoped dependency in grails-app/conf/BuildConfig.groovy file:

grails.project.dependency.resolution = {
    …
    plugins {
        build ':release:3.0.0'
    }
}

And execute the publish-plugin command to release your plugin:

grails publish-plugin

This will automatically publish the plugin to the central repository. If the command is successful, it will immediately be available on the plugin portal at http://grails.org/plugin/<pluginName>. You can find out more about the Release plugin and its other features in its user guide.

Configuring Additional Repositories

The process for configuring repositories in Grails differs between versions. For version of Grails 1.2 and earlier please refer to the Grails 1.2 documentation on the subject. The following sections cover Grails 1.3 and above.

Grails 1.3 and above use Ivy under the hood to resolve plugin dependencies. The mechanism for defining additional plugin repositories is largely the same as defining repositories for JAR dependencies. For example you can define a remote Maven repository that contains Grails plugins using the following syntax in grails-app/conf/BuildConfig.groovy:

repositories {
    mavenRepo "http://repository.codehaus.org"

// ...or with a name mavenRepo name: "myRepo", root: "http://myserver:8081/artifactory/plugins-snapshots-local" }

You can also define a SVN-based Grails repository (such as the one hosted at http://plugins.grails.org) using the grailsRepo method:

repositories {
    grailsRepo "http://myserver/mygrailsrepo"

// ...or with a name grailsRepo "http://myserver/svn/grails-plugins", "mySvnRepo" }

There is a shortcut to setup the Grails central repository:

repositories {
    grailsCentral()
}

The order in which plugins are resolved is based on the ordering of the repositories. So in this case the Grails central repository will be searched last:

repositories {
    grailsRepo "http://myserver/mygrailsrepo"
    grailsCentral()
}

Publishing to Maven Compatible Repositories

In general it is recommended for Grails 1.3 and above to use standard Maven-style repositories to self host plugins. The benefits of doing so include the ability for existing tooling and repository managers to interpret the structure of a Maven repository.

You use the Release plugin to publish a plugin to a Maven repository. Please refer to the section of the Maven deployment user guide on the subject.