How to safely update a grails plugin

Question

I've been working on a grails project for a while now and some of the plugins I installed initially have been updated.

I ran the following scripts to see what plugins needed updating

grails list-plugin-updates

and the result was

Plugins with available updates are listed below:
-------------------------------------------------------------
<Plugin>            <Current>         <Available>
joda-time           1.1               1.2
jquery              1.4.4.1           1.6.1.1
jquery-ui           1.8.7             1.8.11
recaptcha           0.5.0             0.5.2
searchable          0.5.5.1           0.6
spring-security-core1.1               
tomcat              1.3.7             1.3.7.2

Now how do I go about updating all or some these plugins?

Is it a matter of uninstalling and reinstalling each one?

How does this affect usages/references to the plugin in the main code?

Answer 1

To update a plugin you just run install-plugin again and it'll detect that the plugin's already installed and will remove the old one and install the new one. For a small version delta this should be fine, but I'd do them one at a time and test in-between (but do the 2 JQuery plugins together).

If you're lucky the plugin either has no compatibility issues, or they're documented in the plugin docs, so be sure to check there before upgrading.