2.2 Downloading and Installing

The first step to getting up and running with Grails is to install the distribution.

The best way to install Grails on *nix systems is with SDKMAN which greatly simplifies installing and managing multiple Grails versions.

Install with SDKMAN

To install the latest version of Grails using SDKMAN, run this on your terminal:

  1. sdk install grails

You can also specify a version

  1. sdk install grails 4.0.0

You can find more information about SDKMAN usage on the SDKMAN Docs

Manual installation

For manual installation follow these steps:

  • Download a binary distribution of Grails and extract the resulting zip file to a location of your choice

  • Set the GRAILS_HOME environment variable to the location where you extracted the zip

  • On Unix/Linux based systems this is typically a matter of adding something like the following export GRAILS_HOME=/path/to/grails to your profile

  • On Windows this is typically a matter of setting an environment variable under My Computer/Advanced/Environment Variables

  • Then add the bin directory to your PATH variable:

  • On Unix/Linux based systems this can be done by adding export PATH="$PATH:$GRAILS_HOME/bin" to your profile

  • On Windows this is done by modifying the Path environment variable under My Computer/Advanced/Environment Variables

If Grails is working correctly you should now be able to type grails -version in the terminal window and see output similar to this:

  1. Grails version: 4.0.0