grails geb -baseUrl option does not work for remote services

Question

I'm using the geb 0.9.2 plugin for grails 2.3.4

I want to run the functional tests separately from the service, on two separate hosts.

I have observed the following:

If I run the service on the same host, and execute:

grails test-app functional: -baseUrl=http://localhost:8080/foo/--non-interactive

then the tests are run against this already running service and pass.

If the service is not running, and I execute that same command, then a new service instance is started inside grails test-app and the tests are run against that. (This is unexpected to me)

If the service is running on a different host, at say http://other:16060/foo/ and I run:

grails test-app functional: -baseUrl=http://other:16060/foo/ --non-interactive

... then a local service is started and the tests are run against that rather than against the specified remote service. Again this is unexpected to me.

I can't find any documentation explaining this behaviour.

Is it possible to run test-app against a remotely running service?

(my recollection although I have not tested it recently is this behaviour was also the case with grails 2.2.2)

Answer 1

This appears to be a grails bug (?feature).

Grails checks to see if the service is running by connecting to the service port.

If the service is not running, it starts a service.

The niggle is: The check to see if the service is running is always made against localhost/127.0.0.1 even if the baseUrl points to a different host.

I worked around it by starting a fake server on 127.0.0.1 using the unix nc tool. That is sufficient to make grails think the service is already running and not start up a new one. It then respects the baseUrl and tests the remote one.

Ugh.