grails.project.dependency.resolution = {
...
dependencies {
// Required to generate the TattleTale report by the TattleTale GANT script.
build 'org.jboss.tattletale:tattletale:1.1.2.Final'
...
}
}
Integrating JBoss tattletale with Grails
04 March 2014
Prior to version 2.3 of the Grails Framework, it was difficult, if not impossible, to use Maven to build a Grails-based application or plugin. Besides losing the obvious benefits of Maven-based builds, such as dependency management and the rich ecosystem of existing plugins, one of the things that is lacking is an easy way to enforce environmental constraints, such as with the Maven Enforcer plugin. The Maven Enforcer plugin includes the ability to fail a build when detecting multiple versions of the same class on the classpath. This is particularly handy when an application depends on libraries that include classes from another library in order to reduce the number of required dependencies (this is particularly common with libraries that are not published to a Maven repository or some other type of dependency management repository). Since using the Maven Enforcer plugin is not an option in applications using Grails <2.3, I decided to look at other alternatives to provide the duplicate class checking functionality.
JBoss tattletale
JBoss Tattletale is a similar project to the Maven Enforcer plugin in that it provides many of the same analytics with regards to the classes and dependencies that are part of a Java library/application. In addition to its
feature set, JBoss Tattletale also has the ability to be embedded/called programmatically, which is a must for integrating it into a Grails Gant script. The first step to including a Grails command line target
that can perform the JBoss Tattletale analysis is to include the JBoss Tattletale dependency as a build scoped dependency:
BuildConfig.groovy
This makes the dependency available to the Gant script without exporting the dependency when the application or plugin is package (or in the case of a plugin, the dependency is not added to the classpath when it is
consumed by a Grails application). The next step is to write a Gant script that performs the JBoss Tattletale analysis. Below is an example script that I wrote that expands the packaged application, runs the analysis
and then outputs the HTML report to the target/tattletale-report directory:
scripts/TattleTale.groovy
import org.jboss.tattletale.Main
includeTargets << grailsScript("_GrailsArgParsing")
includeTargets << grailsScript("_GrailsSettings")
includeTargets << grailsScript("_GrailsClasspath")
// Default list of comma separated report names to generate.
DEFAULT_REPORTS='multiplejars'
// Default list of comma separated JAR files to exclude. These JARS are from the Grails global dependencies,
// so there is not a lot we can do about resolving duplicate classes from the JAR files.
DEFAULT_EXCLUDES='commons-beanutils-1.8.3.jar,commons-logging-1.1.1.jar,aspectjrt-1.6.10.jar,grails-plugin-controllers-2.0.3.jar'
/*
* Target used to generated the TattleTale (http://www.jboss.org/tattletale/) report for the encapsulating Grails application.
* The application's archive (WAR file) MUST be built prior to running this script to invoke the TattleTale report. If
* the WAR file is present, the following steps are performed:
*
* 1) The previous report is deleted.
* 2) The archive is unzipped to the target directory of the application.
* 3) The TattleTale report(s) are generated.
* 4) The expanded archive is deleted.
*
* The TattleTale reports that are generated can be configured by running the script with the following option:
*
* grails tattleTale --reports=mulitplelocations,multiplejars
*
* The files that are scanned by TattleTale can be configured by adding additional exclusions via an argument:
*
* grails tattleTale --excludes=foo.jar,bar.jar
*
* See the TattleTale User's Guide for information about the available reports (http://docs.jboss.org/tattletale/userguide/1.1/html_single/#maven_report).
*/
target(tattleTale: "Called from build jobs on Hudson to perform a TattleTale analysis on the application's archive.") {
parseArguments()
def appName = metadata['app.name']
def reports = argsMap.reports ?: DEFAULT_REPORTS
def excludes = argsMap.excludes ? "${DEFAULT_EXCLUDES},${argsMap.excludes}" : DEFAULT_EXCLUDES
def archiveFile = "target/${appName}.war"
def expandedArchiveDir = "target/${appName}"
def reportDir = 'target/tattletale-report'
if(new File(archiveFile).exists()) {
ant.delete(dir:reportDir, failonerror:"false", verbose:"true")
grailsConsole.addStatus "************ Unzipping application archive '${archiveFile}'..."
ant.unzip(src: archiveFile , dest:expandedArchiveDir, overwrite:"true")
grailsConsole.addStatus "************ Running TattleTask report for '${appName}'..."
executeTattleTale("${expandedArchiveDir}/WEB-INF/lib", reportDir, reports, excludes)
grailsConsole.addStatus "************ Removing expanded archive for application '${appName}'..."
ant.delete(dir:expandedArchiveDir, failonerror:"false", verbose:"true")
grailsConsole.addStatus "************ Duplicate class check for application '${appName}' completed."
grailsConsole.addStatus "************ TattleTale report available in '${new File(reportDir).absolutePath}/index.html'..."
} else {
grailsConsole.warn "Application archive file ${archiveFile} does NOT exist. Nothing to report! Please build the WAR file before running this script."
}
}
/**
* Executes the TattleTale report.
* @param source The source directory containing JAR files.
* @param destination The output destination directory for the generated report(s).
* @param reports The comma separated string containing the names of the reports to generate.
* @param excludes The comma separated string containing the names of directories or files to exludes
*/
private def executeTattleTale(def source, def destination, def reports, def excludes) {
def tattleTale = new Main()
tattleTale.source = source
tattleTale.destination = destination
tattleTale.reports = reports
tattleTale.excludes = excludes
tattleTale.profiles = 'spring30,java6'
tattleTale.execute()
}
setDefaultTarget(tattleTale)Note that the script above requires the user to first run grails war or grails package-plugin prior to running the grails tattletale target command. It is also possible to hook into the Grails events that get fired to perform the analysis after
compilation has been completed, which would avoid the need to expand the packaged WAR file. Regardless of how you choose to implement the execution of JBoss Tattletale, the end result is still valuable.