Quickly create groovy script in Intellij IDEA

It is sometimes frustrating when you need quickly check db, non-trivial http, or AWS with Groovy. It is fine and great if standard lib is enough for your case, but once you need new libraries, it is not that quick. Grab is amazing, but you need to specify dependency ids and recall exact API and settings. At some point I had a bunch of typical scripts with typical settings, but you have to be in same project to find them, remember not to commit them, and they tend to grow big and have their own lives at some point. Bad for hacking and it is not convenient for majority of one-off cases.

That is where I started using IntelliJ Live Templates: they are available in every project, easily configurable, you can dispose or save results as needed, they accessible from regular files, scratches, even Groovy console.

My typical template consists of everything needed for single use case: grabs, imports, initialisation and bunch of examples. It is always easier to slash unneeded stuff than recall all API specifics. For me, it is more like tldr output, than what typical default template looks like.

There is example of one template I use for AWS S3:

@Grab('com.amazonaws:aws-java-sdk:1.9.31')
import com.amazonaws.auth.BasicAWSCredentials
import com.amazonaws.services.s3.AmazonS3Client
import com.amazonaws.services.s3.model.ObjectMetadata

def client = new AmazonS3Client(new BasicAWSCredentials('access', 'secret'))

println client.listObjects("bucket", "name").getObjectSummaries().collect{it.key}

def meta = new ObjectMetadata()
meta.setContentType("text/plain")
client.putObject("bucket", "name", new ByteArrayInputStream("1".bytes), meta)

client.deleteObject("bucket", "name")

println new String(client.getObject("bucket", "name").objectContent.bytes)

client.listVersions("bucket", "name").versionSummaries.each {
    println "${it.deleteMarker}   ${it.key}   ${it.size}"
}

client.deleteVersion("bucket", "name", "123")

And of course, you can have multiple templates preconfigured for different environments and use cases.

Biggest disadvantages comparing with regular files is that they are stored somewhere deeply in IntelliJ and not easily transferable, still they are easily exportable with other settings. Other disadvantage is that content is not searchable, so you have to pack all keywords as abbreviation or description, but anyway it is not part of universal search.