Programmatically detecting if an external config file has been read in?

Question

We use grails.config.locations to pull in (optional) settings from a file external to the app. Is there a good way to detect that this file was loaded, either in Bootstrap.groovy or within Config.groovy itself?

Config.groovy has this:

grails.config.locations = [
  "file:${userHome}/.grails/${appName}-config.groovy"
]

It'd be nice to know if Grails found and read in this file.

Answer 1

You may be seeing this when turning Grails debug mode, but you don't want to do that. I am using the following strategy. First I check if the file exists:

 def externalConfigFile = "${userHome}/.grails/${appName}-config.groovy"
 if (new File(externalConfigFile).exists()) {
     grails.config.locations << "file:" + externalConfigFile
     log.info "External configuration file found at ${externalConfigFile} ..." 
 }

And then in the file itself I just log that it was run:

 log.info 'External config file was loaded.'

So now I can see in the logs upon startup that I found an external configuration file, it is an existing file, and the file was run by Grails, so it is loaded.

I haven't found anything better as yet.