Why are there two ways to configure plugins for grails?

Question

A grails application I work with has two ways to include plugins:

first in the application.properties file:

plugins.cache-headers=1.0.4
plugins.cached-resources=1.1
plugins.database-migration=1.1
plugins.export=1.5
plugins.font-awesome-resources=3.2.1.2

and in the BuildConfig.groovy file:

runtime ":resources:1.1.6"
compile ":database-migration:1.3.6"
compile ":quartz:0.4.2"
compile ":export:1.5"
compile ":font-awesome-resources:3.2.1.2"

It seems confusing that the database migration plugin is version 1.1 in application resources and 1.3.6 in BuildConfig.

Why are there two ways to configure plugins for grails?

Answer 1

Yes there are two ways of installing plugins.

The old way of declaring dependencies, using the command install-plugin. This will work with application.properties.

In Grails 2.x the preferred way is to use BuildConfig.groovy since this is more flexible, you can exclude jars/dependencies, define the scope and config the dependency to not be exported.

plugins {
  test() //test scoped plugin
  compile("group:name:version") {
    excludes "some-dependency" //install the plugin, but not his dependency
  }
  compile("...") {
    export = false //use this dependency, but not export.
  }
}

With install-plugin, all your dependencies will be compile scoped.

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