For quite a while I have been stuck using grails 2.2.0 on a Travis CI build server due to any later version not being added to the groovy ppa on ubuntu. This was done because of the move to the GVM tool. I was able to cobble together a travis script and GVM hack to get this working. This is great because now I can use Grails 2.2.1, 2.2.2, etc.

The Hack

When setting up the script I noticed that it was failing due to a return code of 1. I forked and inspected the GVM code and identified a fix. It needed to return a 0 after it does the install.

I have submitted a pull request to fix the return issue in the gvm-install.sh script, but in the meantime you will need to keep the bit in the before-install block where it grabs my file and replaces the current one as seen in the script below.

The Setup

Travis appears to come with a package called GVM already on the box for Go language management. We have to remove that first via rm -rf ~/.gvm. We are then free to install GVM as it will not fail the check for the ~/.gvm directory.

Travis doesn’t like you to pipe commands back to bash as suggested in the GVM docs via curl -s get.gvmtool.net | bash so we have to get the install script and stick it into local file to execute. We do this via this code block.

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curl -s get.gvmtool.net > ~/install_gvm.sh
chmod 775 ~/install_gvm.sh
~/install_gvm.sh

We then have to tell GVM to not prompt us defaults during install by appending to the config echo "gvm_auto_answer=true" > ~/.gvm/etc/config.

Then we hack the install with my pull (which can hopefully be removed later) via curl -s https://raw.github.com/ctoestreich/gvm/master/src/main/bash/gvm-install.sh > ~/.gvm/src/gvm-install.sh

After that we are golden to set up the source and install any version of grails we need.

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source ~/.gvm/bin/gvm-init.sh
gvm install grails 2.2.1
gvm use grails 2.2.1

The rest of the build file is pretty vanilla.

The Script

Here is the .travis.yml script that you will need for your project and a link to a working example.

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language: groovy

jdk:
- oraclejdk6

before_install:
- rm -rf ~/.gvm
- curl -s get.gvmtool.net > ~/install_gvm.sh
- chmod 775 ~/install_gvm.sh
- ~/install_gvm.sh
- echo "gvm_auto_answer=true" > ~/.gvm/etc/config
- curl -s https://raw.github.com/ctoestreich/gvm/master/src/main/bash/gvm-install.sh > ~/.gvm/src/gvm-install.sh
- source ~/.gvm/bin/gvm-init.sh
- gvm install grails 2.2.1
- gvm use grails 2.2.1

branches:
  only:
    - master

script: grails test-app --non-interactive

Once the pull request is complete you will be able to remove the line:

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- curl -s https://raw.github.com/ctoestreich/gvm/master/src/main/bash/gvm-install.sh > ~/.gvm/src/gvm-install.sh