Packaging a Groovy application

Question

I want to package a Groovy CLI application in a form that's easy to distribute, similar to what Java does with JARs. I haven't been able to find anything that seems to be able to do this. I've found a couple of things like this that are intended for one-off scripts, but nothing that can compile an entire Groovy application made up of a lot of separate Groovy files and resource data.

I don't necessarily need to have the Groovy standalone executable be a part of it (though that would be nice), and this is not a library intended to be used by other JVM languages. All I want is a simply packaged version of my application.

EDIT: Based on the couple of responses I got, I don't think I was being clear enough on my goal. What I'm looking for is basically a archive format that Groovy can support. The goal here is to make this easier to distribute. Right now, the best way is to ZIP it up, have the user unzip it, and then modify a batch/shell file to start it. I was hoping to find a way to make this more like an executable JAR file, where the user just has to run a single file.

I know that Groovy compiles down to JVM-compatible byte-code, but I'm not trying to get this to run as Java code. I'm doing some dynamic addition of Groovy classes at runtime based on the user's configuration and Java won't be able to handle that. As I said in the original post, having the Groovy executable is included in the archive is kind of a nice-to-have. However, I do actually need Groovy to be executable that runs, not Java.

Answer 1

The Gradle Cookbook shows how to make a "fat jar" from a groovy project: http://wiki.gradle.org/display/GRADLE/Cookbook#Cookbook-Creatingafatjar

This bundles up all the dependencies, including groovy. The resulting jar file can be run on the command line like:

java -jar myapp.jar