Grails 3 Support in Netbeans

Netbeans is a free IDE written in Java. It is solid and robust and has full Grails 3 support. It even works for multi-projects.

Getting Netbeans

Be sure you have a newish (at least 7, preferably 8) JDK installed and your JAVA_HOME system variable is set.

Download and install Netbeans. You can download the smallest version. You can always install additional functionality later as needed.

Grails 3 Support

Fire up Netbeans. Go to Tools -> Plugins -> Available Plugins and install the Groovy and Grails plugin. You may look through the many plugins and additionally install whatever you like. But don't go overboard. You can at any time install later what you may need.

Then go to the Gradle Support plugin page and download the 4.1MB nbm file. Needless to say, note where you put it. Have a look on this plugin page and see what the plugin can do. Note the image at the left top that shows what a Grails 3 project looks like when opened after installing this plugin. This image also shows a multi-project opened after installation of this plugin. Back to your installed and running Netbeans installation. In the Plugins window which you used just now to install the Groovy and Grails plugin, select the Downloaded tab, find the file you just downloaded and install it.

You will now be able to open any root folder of a Grails 3 project with a build.gradle file in it. Even multi-projects. You can now go File -> Open Project and open this root folder. Note, this is not an import action.

After using Netbeans with Grails 3 for a while, you will agree that this is excellent value for free.

And finally...

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