To start Grails in interactive mode we simply type grails on the command line. This starts Grails and we get an environment to run Grails commands like compile and run-app. Since Grails 3 the underlying build system has changed from Gant to Gradle. We can invoke Gradle tasks in interactive mode with the gradle command. Just like we would use Gradle from the command line we can run the same tasks, but this time when Grails is in interactive mode. Grails will use the Gradle version that belongs to the current Grails version.
We even get TAB completion for Gradle tasks.
In the next example we start Grails in interactive mode and run the Gradle task components:
$ grails
| Enter a command name to run. Use TAB for completion:
grails> gradle components
:components
------------------------------------------------------------
Root project
------------------------------------------------------------
No components defined for this project.
Additional source sets
----------------------
Java source 'main:java'
src/main/java
JVM resources 'main:resources'
src/main/resources
grails-app/views
grails-app/i18n
grails-app/conf
Java source 'test:java'
src/test/java
JVM resources 'test:resources'
src/test/resources
Java source 'integrationTest:java'
src/integrationTest/java
JVM resources 'integrationTest:resources'
src/integrationTest/resources
Additional binaries
-------------------
Classes 'integrationTest'
build using task: :integrationTestClasses
platform: java8
tool chain: JDK 8 (1.8)
classes dir: build/classes/integrationTest
resources dir: build/resources/integrationTest
Classes 'main'
build using task: :classes
platform: java8
tool chain: JDK 8 (1.8)
classes dir: build/classes/main
resources dir: build/resources/main
Classes 'test'
build using task: :testClasses
platform: java8
tool chain: JDK 8 (1.8)
classes dir: build/classes/test
resources dir: build/resources/test
Note: currently not all plugins register their components, so some components may not be visible here.
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 0.506 secs
Next we invoke gradle compile followed by TAB. We get all the Gradle tasks that start with compile:
grails> gradle compile<TAB> compileGroovy compileGroovyPages compileIntegrationTestGroovy compileIntegrationTestJava compileJava compileTestGroovy compileTestJava compileWebappGroovyPages grails>
Written with Grails 3.0.8.
