Chapter 17. Beyond compile, test, run
This chapter covers
- Managing dependencies
- Packaging and deploying your application
- Using continuous integration
- Integrating multiproject builds
Grails gives you all the tools you need to build your web application and run it, as we’ve shown throughout the previous chapters. The ability to make changes and see their effect immediately in a running server makes for a productive development environment. At a certain point, though, you need to deploy your application into a production setting: grails run-app isn’t going to cut it. It won’t scale or perform efficiently.
Getting to the point of deployment can potentially be a single-step process (use the Grails war command to create the artifact of deployment), but most projects have more to them. Systems often consist of multiple projects that depend on one another, and you typically have multiple teams working on them. Building the software then becomes a process of pulling all these components together, verifying that they work, packaging them, and deploying one or more of the components to production.