Grails installation step by step

Here's how to get a bare Grails application up and running:

1. Go to Apps in the control panel and create a new 'custom app listening on port' application. Name it as you please and make a note of the port number assigned to the app. For this example, I'll name it 'hello_grails'.

2. Edit a website record, or add a new one, to host your grails app. Let's say that we will host this app at ilias.webfactional.com

3. Login to your server via SSH and download Grails source and place it to the lib directory.

     cd ~/lib
     wget http://dist.springframework.org.s3.amazonaws.com/release/GRAILS/grails-2.0.0.zip
     unzip grails-2.0.0.zip
     ln -s grails-2.0.0 grails
     rm grails-2.0.0.zip
     cd ..

4. Edit your .bashrc file with your favourite editor and add the following exports:

     export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java
     export GRAILS_HOME=$HOME/lib/grails
     export PATH="$PATH:$GRAILS_HOME/bin"

5. This should make your grails executable available:

     $ grails -version
     Grails version: 2.0.0

6. Create a new grails app and start your server:

     cd ~/webapps/
     grails create-app hello_grails
     cd hello_grails
     grails -Dserver.port=YOUR_PORT run-app &

7. Visit your website at http://ilias.webfactional.com/hello_grails and you'll be welcomed with a friendly Grails page.

Of course, serving your website from the developer server is not a best practice, and while it might handle a small amount of traffic, it would be better export a war file of your application and deploy it using a servlet like Tomcat.