Written on February 07, 2014

Grails - Environments in BuildConfig

As of Grails 2.3 it is possible to use the Environment class everywhere in BuildConfig.groovy. This can be useful for environment-specific settings regarding all the configuration that can be done in BuildConfig.groovy including dependencies and plugins.

What’s the deal?

Recently I came across an issue with the UI performance plugin (like mentioned by someone on the Grails user list) where we needed to exclude dependencies to be only used in the test environment. Before Grails 2.3.x it was only possible to use the Environment class inside the dependencies or plugins closure:

dependencies {
	
  	// ...

	if (Environment.current != Environment.PRODUCTION)  {
    	test "org.gebish:geb-junit4:0.9.2"
        test "org.seleniumhq.selenium:selenium-support:2.39.0"
        test "org.seleniumhq.selenium:selenium-firefox-driver:2.39.0"
        test "org.seleniumhq.selenium:selenium-chrome-driver:2.39.0"
    }
}

plugins {
	
	// ...

	test ":spock:0.7"
    test(":cucumber:0.10.0") {
    	exclude "spock-core"
    }

    test ":code-coverage:1.2.7"
    test ":geb:0.9.2"
}

This little trick was possible because the closure was evaluated at a point of time where the Environment already had been initialized. Something along the lines of

grails.server.port.http = 8080

Environment.executeForEnvironment(Environment.DEVELOPMENT)  {
    grails.server.port.http = 8082	
}

wouldn’t have been successful caused by the Environment class not being initialized at runtime.

This behaviour has been fixed in Grails 2.3, the BuildConfig DSL has even been extended to support the environments block feature. We can use it to specify environment-specific dependencies blocks or other BuildConfig configuration settings:

environments {
	test {
		dependencies {
			test "org.gebish:geb-junit4:0.9.2"
        	test "org.seleniumhq.selenium:selenium-support:2.39.0"
        	test "org.seleniumhq.selenium:selenium-firefox-driver:2.39.0"
        	test "org.seleniumhq.selenium:selenium-chrome-driver:2.39.0"
		}
	}
}

Conclusion

Before 2.3.x the Environment could only be used restrictively in BuildConfig.groovy. With 2.3.x this issue has been fixed and support for the environments block has been added to the BuildConfig DSL.

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