Make groovy script grab a jar off the filesystem like grape - groovy

Question

Grape seems to work fairly well for adding jars to your classpath. It
also does a lot of other things such as fetching and dependency management.
e.g.
#!/home/robert/bin/groovy
import org.apache.commons.lang.StringUtils
#Grab(group='commons-lang', module='commons-lang', version='2.4')
def strings = ['Hello', 'Groovy', 'AVeryLongWord!', 'A simple sentence']
strings.each { String aString ->
println "$aString: ${StringUtils.abbreviate(aString,10)}"
}
Unfortunately if there is a jar on my filesystem that I want to
dynamically add to the filesystem then I have to resort to a much
uglier solution.
#!/home/robert/bin/groovy
def loader = this.class.classLoader.rootLoader
loader.addURL(new File("/home/robert/somejars/arithmetic-1.1.jar").toURI().toURL())
// can't use traditional package import
arithmeticMainClass = Class.forName("org.scharp.arithmetic.Main")
println "42 - 23 = " + arithmeticMainClass.subtract(42, 23)
// can't use "new" operator
myArithmeticObject = arithmeticMainClass.newInstance()
Is there a way to make grape grab a jar from the filesystem? If not,
can I somehow replicate what grape is doing in groovy/java?
I would like this solution to work for scripts that can be run by many users and many incompatible jars so adding jars to a common directory such as ~/.groovy/lib/ won't work.
I could create a local maven repository for local, jar libaries but
that seems like overkill.

Answer 1

This is how I solved this.
When Grape (Ivy) wants something it caches it under the ~/.groovy/grapes directory. All you need to do is just create your own ivy.xml file and throw your jar in there. I figured it out by just looking at some of the other artifacts donwloaded from maven. Here is a small example.....
We use Oracle here and I wanted it's jdbc jar file to be able to be 'Grabbed' by my Groovy scripts.
Unfortunately, I could not find any repository that had this jar on the web.
Step 1 : create directory ~/.groovy/grapes/com.oracle
Step 2 : create directory ~/.groovy/grapes/com.oracle/ojdbc6
Step 3 : create directory ~/.groovy/grapes/com.oracle/ojdbc6/jars
Step 4 : Get a copy of Oracle's ojdbc jar file and rename it. Our oracle version is 11.2.0.1.0 and we use Java6 so I got the locally installed ojdbc6.jar file and copied as ojdbc6-11.2.0.1.0.jar. This file I put into the directory created in the prior step.
Step 5 : create an ivy-11.2.0.1.0.xml config file.This file should be put into the directory created in step 2. For this step I heavily relied on examples from other artifacts grabbed. Any apache commons lib is a good example.
Here is my xml.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ivy-module version="2.0" xmlns:m="http://ant.apache.org/ivy/maven"
>
<info organisation="com.oracle" module="ojdbc6" revision="11.2.0.1.0" status="release" publication="20130102153401">
<license name="" />
<description homepage="">Oracle ojdbc driver</description>
</info>
<configurations>
<conf name="default" visibility="public" description="" extends="runtime,master" />
<conf name="master" visibility="public" description="" />
<conf name="compile" visibility="public" description="" />
<conf name="provided" visibility="public" description="" />
<conf name="runtime" visibility="public" description="" extends="compile" />
<conf name="test" visibility="public" description="" extends="runtime" />
<conf name="system" visibility="public" description="" />
<conf name="sources" visibility="public" description="" />
<conf name="javadoc" visibility="public" description="" />
<conf name="optional" visibility="public" description="" />
</configurations>
<publications>
<artifact name="ojdbc6" type="jar" ext="jar" conf="master" />
</publications>
</ivy-module>
Now I can use this jar in my groovy scripts with the following....
#Grapes([
#GrabConfig(systemClassLoader=true),
#Grab('com.oracle:ojdbc6:11.2.0.1.0'),
])
import groovy.sql.*
To make things easy for deploying this grape to multiple servers I created a zip file that I could extract anywhere....
$ unzip -qql oracle_jdbc_groovy_grape.zip
0 06-11-2012 13:50 .groovy/grapes/com.oracle/
0 06-12-2012 14:17 .groovy/grapes/com.oracle/ojdbc6/
0 06-12-2012 14:17 .groovy/grapes/com.oracle/ojdbc6/jars/
2111220 06-11-2012 11:46 .groovy/grapes/com.oracle/ojdbc6/jars/ojdbc6-11.2.0.1.0.jar
2349 06-11-2012 11:50 .groovy/grapes/com.oracle/ojdbc6/ivy-11.2.0.1.0.xml

Answer 2

You can customize the ivy settings that Grape uses by creating a ~/.groovy/grapeConfig.xml file.
Here's an example how to use the local file system as repository:
<ibiblio name="local" root="file:${user.home}/.m2/repository/" m2compatible="true"/>

Answer 3

There's been some interest in adding this feature to grape but nothing serious. My guess is that it's unlikely that this will be added in the near future. (6-18 months)

Answer 4

According to this enhancement, Grapes will now also search your local Maven repo, along with Maven Central.
You can install any jar(s) in your local repo by:
running mvn install in your project
using mvn dependecy:get; see documentation and example
using mvn install:install-file; see documentation and example