I’ve been working on this small application as I continue to tinker around with Grails, and set the source code management up through GitHub so that I can synchronize across machines. My Mac laptop has 2.1.0RC2 while my PC had 2.0.4 where I planned to upgrade to 2.1.0RC2 as well.

When I thought I was good to go I began running into some really strange errors:

I then attempted to do a “grails clean”, and experiment with creating a new app and copy in the source to see if that would make a difference, but continued to encounter the issue.

However I did notice in the output that it was referencing a c:\users\{user}\.grails\{version} directory and attempted to nuke the version folder, and still had the same issue.

However, deleting the entire .grails directory fixed the issue!

Conclusion

There’s obviously caching going on here, and I’m guessing the auto-wizardry that figures out plugin dependencies got out of sync. So deleting that directory causes Grails to download fresh all the components that it needs to build the app.

Error Signature

Error executing bootstraps: Error creating bean with name ‘transactionManagerPostProcessor’: Initialization of bean failed; nested exception is org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name ‘transactionManager’: Cannot resolve reference to bean ‘sessionFactory’ while setting bean property  ‘sessionFactory’;

This week I’m looking into integrating a CMS into a Grails application. Initially there won’t be much tight integration but it could involve single sign-on and lead into much tighter application embedding CMS content.

As it happens, there is a CMS built on Grails called Weceem – it took some trial and error to get it working as the documentation could use a lot of work. Here are some tips if you’re trying to get it working on Mac OSX (as a quick and simple standalone development mode).

Tomcat

• Download the tar.gz distribution of Tomcat.
• Decompress Tomcat.
• Copy the folder somewhere as desired, I used /opt/apache-tomcat-7.023. Check out this really good tutorial here.
• Download the MySQL JDBC driver.
• Copy the MySQL JDBC driver (i.e. the mysql-connector-java-{ver}-bin.jar file_ to {tomcat home}/lib. I read postings that say you can copy to a common/lib folder, but that didn’t seem to work.
• Edit the {tomcat home}/conf/tomcat-users.xml file and add something along the following lines:

  <role rolename="admin"/>
  <user username="admin" password="admin" roles="manager-gui,admin"/>

Create a MySQL Database

• Create a DB in MySQL called whatever you’d like (I used cms).
• Create a username and password that has access to read/write/modify the schema.

Weceem config file

Create a weceem.properties file somewhere. /etc/weceem.properties might be a good choice. It’ll look like the following, update accordingly.

# Control whether or not connection pooling is enabled
dataSource.pooled=true
dataSource.driverClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
dataSource.username=dbusername
dataSource.password=dbpassword
dataSource.dbCreate=update
dataSource.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost/cms
searchable.index.path=/Websites/cms/search-indexes

Make sure that whatever you set as the searchable.index.path is a directory that that the user Tomcat will run under has read/write access to.

Update your environment variables

Edit your ~/.profile and make sure you have the following lines, update path accordingly:

export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home
export CATALINA_HOME=/opt/apache-tomcat-7.0.23
export JAVA_OPTS=-Dweceem.config.location=file:/Websites/cms/weceem.properties
export CATALINA_OPTS="-Xms756m -Xmx756m -XX:NewSize=256m
                      -XX:MaxNewSize=512m -XX:PermSize=256m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m"

Deploy Weceem

• Download the Weceem.war file.
• Copy the Weceem-{ver}.war file to {tomcat home}/webapps/weceem-{ver}.war.
• You can rename the Weceem file to just Weceem.war if you’d like.

See what happens

• Open a terminal window.
• cd to {tomcat home}/bin
• Type in ./startup.sh – you’ll see some stuff about environment variables, and the command line will return back to you.
• Open another terminal window.
• In the second terminal window, cd to {tomcat home}/logs, and type in tail -f catalina.out
• You should eventually see a line that says “INFO: Server startup in xyz ms”
• Open up a browser to http://localhost:8080/manager/html (use the username and password you set up when editing the tomcat-users.xml file above).
• You should see the Weceem application listed and started. If it’s not started, click on the start button.

• Once running, just click on the left column (the path column) and it should load up the default Weceem page.
• There’ll be a link on that page to edit content, the default admin user name and password is admin/admin.

Hope that helps save someone time who wants to tinker around with it.