Thursday, June 25, 2015

How to create executable JAR from single Groovy script

Groovy scripts are nice - they allow to use dependencies and write logic in small single file, but Groovy is mostly available on developers machine, but not on servers, so deploying them is a little more tricky. You can package them in uberjar with Gradle, but it requires additional build file and compatible structure, so it is more like project than script already.

To keep things simple, I have created Groovy script that converts other Groovy scripts into executable JARs. It packages all dependencies from Grab and compiles original script into Java main class with same name as script and sets it in manifest. So it is perfectly usable from empty JVM. JAR structure is also compatible with AWS lambda, so it can be launched from there too, just put logic in specific method. To convert your script, just download it from here and run like:

./scriptjar.groovy input.groovy output.jar

Script tries to find groovy libs via GROOVY_HOME, so set it or just hack it for your location, it is just one small Groovy script.