Grails in Production

There are a few gotcha’s when deploying a Grails war in a container like Tomcat.¹ Most commonly are issues with stacktrace.log. Second most common are issues with file based db’s.

Setting stacktrace.log

Open up grails-app/conf/Config.groovy. If you haven’t edited it at all there should be a commented out block called appenders. Uncomment that and set it to the following:

appenders {
    console name:'stdout', layout:pattern(conversionPattern: '%c{2} %m%n')
    file name: 'stacktrace', file: "/var/log/tomcat6/stacktrace.log"
}

By default Grails tries to create a stacktrace.log file in the directory it is executed in, which is won’t have permission to do unless you’ve overridden the permissions (not recommended). Here an appender named stacktrace is defined and mapped to a file in a directory that it will be able to write to.

Setting up H2

Grails now uses H2 for it’s in-memory and default database. If you’ve kept H2 around in production as a file based db then you need to put that in another location it can actually access.

Open up grails-app/conf/DataSource.groovy. In your environments.production.dataSource block set the url property like so:

url = "jdbc:h2:file:/usr/local/grailsdb;MVCC=TRUE"

You can change the path or name to whatever you like, point is it isn’t left as the default which means it will try to create it in a directory it won’t have permission to use.