My friend, John Ferguson Smart recently wrote an article for java.net entitled “Grails and Continuous Integration: An Essential Combo” in which he demonstrates how to leverage Hudson’s Grails plug-in. Hudson is a hip CI server and having the ability to monitor a Grails project is quite neat. I highly recommend reading his article!

If you’re Hudson server is running as a system process (for example, as a Windows service as I’ve recently experienced) you might have some challenges running Grails plug-ins. Specially, if you’re server sits behind a proxy, the Hudson’s Grails service won’t leverage your id’s preferences found in your home directory (your home directory in Windows is found in the C:\Documents and Settings directory and is your user name). Accordingly, you’ll see that Hudson will create a .grails directory most likely on your C: drive. Simply copy the scripts directory from your home’s .grails directory into this newly created one and things will work just fine (i.e. Grails inside of Hudson will pick up your proxy settings so as to download required plug-ins such as the ever-so-hip Functional Test plug-in).

There’s probably a more formal and less hack-ish means for accomplishing the same goal, but this works for a reasonably large project, baby!