Ted Naleid

At work, we’re using mercurial for our source control. As we’ve released code to production we’ve needed to branch our repository to support what’s in production as well as ongoing development.

By default, grails uses ~/.grails as the working directory. If you’re doing branchy development, you can run into problems with this if you’ve got plugins installed in one branch that aren’t in the other. Having a unique directory per branch prevents you from having to run grails clean all the time.

Here’s a quick shell script that changes the grails working directory to have the branch name as a suffix if your source is contained in a mercurial repository (ex: the default branch would be ~/.grails_default and the 1.0 branch would be ~/.grails_1.0). If your application is not in a repo, it just uses the regular ~/.grails directory.

#!/bin/sh
HG_BRANCH=`hg branch 2>/dev/null`
GRAILS_SCRIPT=$GRAILS_HOME/bin/grails
 
if [ $HG_BRANCH ]; then
	GRAILS_WORK_DIR=`echo ~`/.grails_$HG_BRANCH
	echo "** grails working directory: $GRAILS_WORK_DIR"
	$GRAILS_SCRIPT -Dgrails.work.dir=$GRAILS_WORK_DIR $@
else
	echo "** default grails working directory"
	$GRAILS_SCRIPT $@
fi

Just save this script as “grails” and put it in your PATH before the $GRAILS_HOME/bin directory (also make sure that you’ve defined $GRAILS_HOME). I have a ~/bin directory that’s the first thing in my PATH.

If you use the grails-debug command, you can repeat these steps for that, just change GRAILS_SCRIPT to $GRAILS_HOME/bin/grails-debug.

This same technique could easily be modified to be used for other source control systems such as git or subversion.

This past week, I gave a presentation to the DevJam meeting on the advantages of using Mercurial, a DVCS (Distributed Version Control System) over tools like Subversion, Perforce, and ClearCase.
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A while ago I blogged about my grails testing aliases and how much time they save me.

I’ve made some enhancements to them in the interim that have made them even easier to use.

The most important alias is gtaf, which is short for “grails test-app” for failed tests.

It will search through your test output directory and look for any tests that failed. If it finds any, it will rerun only those tests. Otherwise, it will rerun all tests. That makes it easy to just use gtaf all the time. If any tests fail, it will open them up using Console.app.

If you’re not on OSX, or would like to use something else to view the failed test logs, just modify the testlog alias to do something different.
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I’m currently working at a startup that’s small enough that we don’t have a dedicated DBA and I’ve been doing a lot of mysql maintenance work recently. I wanted a quick dashboard for which commands were currently running and how long they’ve been running for. Sort of like top but for mysql.

Combining the unix “watch” command with the mysql “show processlist” command gives me what I’m looking for. A quick, self-updating status of the current state of the database.

watch -n 5 --differences "mysql -u username -psekrit -e 'show processlist'"

Shows something like this:

Every 5.0s: mysql -n 5 -u username -psekrit -e 'show processlist'                                   Thu Jun 18 05:25:14 2009
 
Id      User    Host       db      Command Time    State         Info
3141    admin   localhost  mydb    Query   34978   freeing items SELECT id, type, active, email FROM user WHERE email
3146    admin   localhost  mydb    Sleep   0                     NULL       
24876   root    localhost  NULL    Query   0       NULL          show processlist

Where the “time” column is the number of seconds the query has been running, and Info holds the actual query (you can use “show full processlist” to see the full query).

Watch is a nice little linux util that runs a command every “n” seconds (it defaults to 2 seconds). If you use the –differences switch, it will highlight the differences between one update and another. I use watch for all kinds of monitoring activities, such as watching a directory to see a file grow in size as it gets transfered.

Here’s a quick shell function that you can add to your .bashrc/.bash_profile/.zshrc to use on arbitrary hosts:

function mysqltop() {
    MYSQL_OPTS=$@
    watch -n 5 --differences "mysql $MYSQL_OPTS -e 'show processlist'"
}

Then just pass in any creds/host info you need like a normal mysql command:

mysqltop -u ted -psekrit1 -h example.com -P 3307

If you’re on linux, you probably already have “watch” installed. If you’re on OSX, you probably don’t, but you can get it quickly through macports. Install macports, make sure “port” is in your path and run:

sudo port install watch

There is also a command called mytop that you can get which looks like the same thing, but prints out the processlist details with some nicer formatting and a little extra information. It’s in macports, but it has a number of dependencies including mysql so if you didn’t install mysql through macports, you might want to stick with what I have above or get it another way.

(EDIT: updated with bash function)

I’ve just released version 0.2.1 of the build-test-data grails plugin.

The build-test-data plugin makes creating integration test data easy. It decorates your domain objects with a “build” method that will create new domain instances and will automatically populate required fields with data and save it to the database. This enables you to create more maintainable tests where the data you create is targeted specifically at the situations you’re trying to test, without having to go through all of the ceremony of creating the rest of the object graph that you don’t care about.

// creates a new Book instance with all required fields 
// (like the Author that the book belongsTo) populated
def b = Book.build()

To learn more about the basics of the build-test-data plugin, see this blog post and check out the Basic Usage and Sample Code wiki pages.
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I’ve recently thrown together a few different command line aliases that have been very helpful in my grails development and I thought others might benefit from them.

The aliases are primarily just the first letter of the words in the command, which makes them easy to remember (and saves on typing). Some examples:

gta                   # grails test-app
gtai                  # grails test-app -integration
gtaud AuthorService   # grails-debug-suspend test-app -unit AuthorService

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On my MacBook pro, I’ve got 4 removable hard drives (2 physical in 2 partitions each) and a JungleDisk mount.

I found it painful to manually eject each individual drive in the finder so I threw together this quick AppleScript to eject all the disks.

tell application "Finder"
	eject (every disk)
end tell

Just open up /Applications/AppleScript/ScriptEditor.app and paste that in. Then choose “Save As” and pick “Application”. That will compile the script and create a .app file that you can click on to run, or you can put it in your path and execute it there.

I think the same kind of script could be created with the command line “diskutil eject” command, but this seemed cleaner as I wasn’t able to come up with a generic way to figure out which disks were “ejectable” and which weren’t. AppleScript is able to figure that all out for you.

Over the years, I’ve had a number of requests for me to share my zshrc file with friends and coworkers. In the past, I’ve normally trimmed out the sensitive parts by hand and then e-mailed the most useful stuff. I’ve always intended to make this an easier process and I’ve finally gotten around to it.

I’ve created a new bitbucket repository to hold my shared zshrc configuration. You can get it for yourself by cloning the repository:

cd ~
hg clone http://bitbucket.org/tednaleid/shared-zshrc/

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I ran into an issue today when trying to use curl to post something to an https endpoint on one of my Grails applications. Apparently, recent macports versions of curl don’t have full ssl support enabled by default (I have no idea why, this seems like one of the basic use cases of curl).

This is what I was seeing:

% curl -k https://www.google.com
curl: (1) Protocol https not supported or disabled in libcurl

After a bunch of fiddling around looking at the Portfile (located at /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/ports/net/curl/Portfile), I saw that there was something called a variant that seemed to talk about ssl support.

I’d never needed to install a variant of a port before, but it’s actually pretty easy to do. Just add a “+” with the variant name at the end of the install command.

sudo port install curl +ssl

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I work on a couple of different grails projects that use a variety of versions of groovy and grails. I’ve thrown together a quick shell script that makes it easy to create a new alias to switch between different versions depending on what project you’re working with.

function switchGrails() {
    echo "Switching to groovy version: $1"
    echo "Switching to grails version: $2"
    sudo rm /usr/local/{groovy,grails}
 
    sudo ln -s /usr/local/$1 /usr/local/groovy
    sudo ln -s /usr/local/$2 /usr/local/grails
    echo "Done!"
    ls -latr /usr/local/{groovy,grails}
}
 
alias g104='switchGrails "groovy-1.5.7" "grails-1.0.4"'
alias g11rc2='switchGrails "groovy-1.6.0" "grails-1.1-RC2"'

You can create your own aliases like the ones above to switch to the groovy/grails combinations that you happen to be working with.

Just stick the code above in your .profile/.bashrc/.zshrc file and restart your shell to make the aliases available.

This function assumes that you’ve got you’ve got groovy and grails installed in your /usr/local directory and that you use a symlink at /usr/local/groovy that $GROOVY_HOME is pointed to and /usr/local/grails that $GRAILS_HOME is pointed to. If those assumptions aren’t correct for you, you’ll have to tweak the script.

It also uses “sudo” as it assumes that /usr/local is owned by root and not by your logged in user. If you’ve chowned the directory to yourself, you can remove the sudo (and the need to enter your password).

Now it’s easy for me to switch between different projects by just typing the appropriate alias:

pollux% g104
Switching to groovy version: groovy-1.5.7
Switching to grails version: grails-1.0.4
Done!
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  23 Mar  8 19:55 /usr/local/groovy -> /usr/local/groovy-1.5.7
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  23 Mar  8 19:55 /usr/local/grails -> /usr/local/grails-1.0.4
 
 
pollux% g11rc2 
Switching to groovy version: groovy-1.6.0
Switching to grails version: grails-1.1-RC2
Done!
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  23 Mar  8 19:56 /usr/local/groovy -> /usr/local/groovy-1.6.0
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  25 Mar  8 19:56 /usr/local/grails -> /usr/local/grails-1.1-RC2