makeitfaster

I’m playing around with Grails at the moment. Grails is a make-websites-really-fast framework, that is based on the Groovy language. It’s inspired in spirit by Ruby-on-Rails, but it’s based on solid java technology instead.

In my opinion, this the best framework for java developers to switch to. Learning curve for a java developer is a lot easier than ruby/python/scala/clojure etc. and the groovy language is very powerful and easy. Ont eh other hand… it doesn’t teach you how to think differently, and you may be tempted to keep your bad java habits. Anyway, I’m getting derailed. What I really wanted to show you today was how to get grails working on a linux server.

I’ll assume that this is a totally clean install of Ubuntu 10.10 server, I used the 32-bit version, but I think the 64-bit installation will be identical. The first thing we do is to install ssh, so we can log in with putty ( http://www.putty.org/ ) afterwards. Then we upgrade the system, then we reboot.

sudo aptitude install ssh

sudo aptitude update

sudo aptitude upgrade

sudo reboot

Login with putty when the reboot is done. Then install the C++ compiler and the linux headers. It may not be needed, but I tend to do it anyway, as they cover a lot of weird dependencies when installing various development tools. We also install sun’s java (as the openjdk fails to run grails) and groovy (yay, it’s a std package).

sudo aptitude install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)

In order to install sun’s jdk we need to enable some more repositories. Start by running

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Then uncomment the lines for the partner repos and save the file. Partner repos look like this:

## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Canonical's

## 'partner' repository.

## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by Canonical and the

## respective vendors as a service to Ubuntu users.

deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu maverick partner

deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu maverick partner

Update apt with:

sudo aptitude update

Once that is done we can install the sun jdk and groovy

sudo aptitude install sun-java6-jdk

sudo aptitude install groovy unzip

After that we fetch the grails binary, unpack and move it.

wget http://dist.codehaus.org/grails/grails-1.3.5.zip

unzip grails-*.zip

mv grails-1.3.5 grails

sudo rm -r /usr/lib/grails

sudo mv grails /usr/lib/grails

Then we need to edit the environment file, so we can access the JAVA_HOME and GRAILS_HOME. We also add the Grails bin directory to the path. Run these commands:

sudo cp /etc/environment /etc/environment_backup

sudo sed -i 's/\(^PATH=".*\)"/\1:\/usr\/lib\/grails\/bin"\nJAVA_HOME=\/usr\/lib\/jvm\/java-6-sun\nGRAILS_HOME=\/usr\/lib\/grails\n/g' /etc/environment

After the commands, you can verify ( cat /etc/environment ) that the  environment file should look a lot like this:

PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/lib/grails/bin"

JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

GRAILS_HOME=/usr/lib/grails

Once that’s done we need to reboot the system, in order to read the new environment:

sudo reboot

Log in again and test by calling:

grails help

It should show you the version of grails and the help info. To test it for another user, create a user ( sudo adduser <username>) , log in as that user and run “grails help”. If it does that correctly, then this guide worked