How can I efficiently unit test when using dependency resolution via BuildConfig.groovy in Grails?

I want to follow TDD, but the command grails test-app CUT needs almost a minute to run due to Resolving dependencies... and Resolving new plugins. Please wait... ...

Each of those two stages takes about 20 seconds to complete while the tests only take up some seconds.

(I am unsure if this has any effect on the performance,开发者_如何学C but I am using dependency resolution via BuildConfig.groovy - and want to stick with it.)

1. How can I have grails only execute the tests any maybe skip the process of resolving?
2. How else could I speed up the process? (Note that grails interactive is unable to influence the speed of resolving.)

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I had a similar issue and solved it by not using *-SNAPHOT versions of any plugins. I downgraded to the latest non-SNAPSHOT release and cut "resolving dependencies" from 10 seconds to 1 second.

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Ideas:

1. Try removing (or to be safe moving) the directory /.ivy2/cache. The next time you do a 'run-app' all the dependencies will be downloaded again from scratch. After doing this I got my 'Resolving Dependencies...' time down by about 5 seconds.
2. There are some more tips on how to fully clean your directories here A full clean may help if you have some inconsistent files etc.
3. Try turning the logging on in BuildConfig.groovy by setting log to "info" in the grails.project.dependency.resolution section. This can give you a better idea of which dependencies are taking the longest.
4. Make sure your .ivy2 directory is on your local machine. See here for more info

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In Grails 2 there's a new variant of the old (now deprecated) 'interactive' command. In order to start it, one must start grails without any arguments (i.e. grails <ENTER>).

Running test-app from there seems to skip dependecy resolution which ultimately makes tests run much faster now (~40 seconds less in the case mentioned).

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You should write your unit tests in a way that you can run them directly from the IDE. I like looking at the green bar. For example in STS/Eclipse, just do "Run As->Junit Test". If the test requires Grails to be running, it's not an unit test anymore (it's an integration test).

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I am going to have to back up FlareCoder on this. Too many Grails developers get lazy using Grails specific unit tests or worse, make everything an integration test. This is fine if your project is relatively small and your team does not mind Grails to start up every time but it does kind of fly in the face of true TDD.

Once you understand the full power of Groovy outside of Grails, you should try to write unit tests without depending on Grails. The true spirit of a unit test is not requiring a framework. Groovy on its own has many ways to stub/mock classes that don't require a long startup time. Then your unit tests can run individually and as a whole very fast. I do TDD this way in IntelliJ IDEA on a method level that is very fast.

It is NOT true that mocking in Grails requires Grails mocking ALL the time. Sometimes it is harder than other times to achieve this but remember, Grails is simply an abstraction of many cool technologies using some Groovy metaprogramming that allow quick development. If they aren't running like you expect, dig in and understand them so you can remove anything Grails is doing that you don't need.