Effective grails plugin development

Question

This has been very upsetting for me up till now. Here is what I am trying to do:

1. IDE I'm using is Intellij IDEA.
2. Building a grails application.
3. Grails application specifies two dependencies on in house grails plugins also being developed in IntelliJ as separate grails plugin projects.

Now to make any changes to plugins, I update the source code in plugin projects and use mavan-install (Maven Publisher plugin) to deploy to local Maven repository. I have to uninstall the plugin in core grails project. Delete the plugin cache from ivy and then run the core grails project which gets the latest copy of plugin from local maven repository.

What's the effective and ideal way to achieve this? A single change makes me do some 5 minutes of labour work to even test and run core application.

Any recommendations/ best practices?

Answer 1

Use inline plugins for this - see section "Specifying Plugin Locations" in http://grails.org/doc/latest/guide/12.%20Plug-ins.html#12.1%20Creating%20and%20Installing%20Plug-ins

By specifying the plugin project directory with grails.plugin.location.<plugin-name> as the location of the installed plugin, you can edit the real files and the changes will affect the test application, and there's no need to sync anything up.