Dependency management in Grails 1.2

Sometimes I get the impression that there are many Maven haters in the Groovy/Grails community – now with version 1.2 of the Grails framework they are able to abandon the evil satanic Grails Maven Plugin and embrace the neverending joys of a slim, nice, sexy dependency resolution dsl .. here we go .. lets define some dependencies wheee …

Our dependency configuration is defined in grails-app/config/BuildConfig.groovy as a property named grails.project.dependency.resolution:
```
grails.project.dependency.resolution = {
// here will be some dependencies
}
```

The default config look like this:

grails.project.dependency.resolution = {
 inherits "global" // inherit Grails' default dependencies
 log "warn" // log level of Ivy resolver, either 'error', 'warn', 'info', 'debug' or 'verbose'
 repositories {
 grailsHome()

 // uncomment the below to enable remote dependency resolution
 // from public Maven repositories
 //mavenCentral()
 //mavenRepo "http://snapshots.repository.codehaus.org"
 //mavenRepo "http://repository.codehaus.org"
 //mavenRepo "http://download.java.net/maven/2/"
 //mavenRepo "http://repository.jboss.com/maven2/
 }

 dependencies {
 // specify dependencies here under either 'build', 'compile', 'runtime', 'test' or 'provided' scopes eg.
 // runtime 'com.mysql:mysql-connector-java:5.1.5'
 }
}

There are currently five scopes supported: build, compile, runtime, test, provided
If we want to add a dependency for a scope we can do this using the format <scope> <group>:<name>:<version> e.g.:
```
compile 'com.mysql:mysql-connector-java:5.1.5'
```

Adding other maven repositories is also possible e.g. for our internal maven repo:

repositories {
   mavenRepo "http://somesecrethiddenrepositoryneartheamberroom.com"
}

Often we have some additional linked lib folder we want to add to the repo list:
```
repositories {
   flatDir name:'localRepo', dirs:'/var/somerepo'
}
```
That’s not all folk! Authentication is another feature that can be configured using the shiny new dsl (example from the Grails docs):
```
credentials {
   realm = ".."
   host = "localhost"
   username = "myuser"
   password = "mypass"
}
```
Furthermore dependencies are inherited (done by inherit:global), we may define some exclusions here like that:
```
inherits("global") {
   excludes "oscache", "ehcache"
}
```
Another Feature is the dependency report command – after execution we get some dependency reports in our target/dependency-report directory:
```
grails dependency-report
```

Links:

Grails Reference Docs: http://grails.org/doc/latest/guide/3.%20Configuration.html#3.7%20Dependency%20Resolution
Famous Graeme Rocher: “Grails dependancy resolution done right”
Grails Dependency Report Feature: http://grails.org/doc/latest/ref/Command%20Line/dependency-report.html

Conclusion:

sounds nice, nuff’ said :)