What are inline plugins?

Question

What is an inline plugin in Grails 2.X? How to make a plugin inline? I can find the documentation for Grails 3 but not for Grails 2.

Answer 1

Inline plugins in Grails 2.x are outlined in the documentation section for plugins.

From the documentation:

An application can load plugins from anywhere on the file system, even if they have not been installed. Specify the location of the (unpacked) plugin in the application's grails-app/conf/BuildConfig.groovy file

Creating an inline plugin is done using the grails create-plugin command, just like a non-inline plugin.

The only real difference between an inline-plugin and regular plugin is how it is referenced by your application. A normal plugin is pulled from a repository (such as maven) while an inline-plugin exists in source format local to the application that is using it. Take for example:

/usr/foo/grails/MyApplication
/usr/foo/grails/MyInlinePlugin
/usr/foo/grails/MyOtherInlinePlugin

The above application (MyApplication) can include the two plugins listed as inline plugins by using the following in the BuildConfig.groovy

// BuildConfig.groovy
grails.plugin.location.'my-inline-plugin' = "../MyInlinePlugin"
grails.plugin.location.'my-other-inline-plugin' = "../MyOtherInlinePlugin"

Overall inline plugins are useful when developing (or testing) a plugin as well as creating modular Grails applications.

Answer 2

You can find the documentation in this URL: Grails Documentation

Go to the section: User guide for older versions

And select your version of Grails.

Here you can find, for example, the documentation of Grails 2.5.0: Grails Documentation 2.5.0

The inline plugins can help you to debug an application or change the code of your plugins to do your tests, instead of apply the changes in the plugin and when it's released, test if it's OK. It's very useful to change different plugins in the same time.

Hope this helps!