Grails Goodness: Run Gradle Tasks In Grails Interactive Mode

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.