sine qua non

The default generated error.gsp view in Grails displays the stacktrace for any exceptions that occur. That’s nice for debugging in a development environment but it is a security issue for production as it is information leakage. We can easily turn this off when not in development, and do something useful like redirect to the application homepage.
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Grails 1.0.x started creating a stacktrace.log file in the directory where the servlet container starts. In a development environment, using grails run-app, that’s simple enough— it appears in the top level of your application. In a production environment, this becomes a problem. Your production container (e.g. Tomcat) may start someplace where it can’t create files, like /. Thus you get exceptions sent to your container’s log files like:

java.io.FileNotFoundException: stacktrace.log (Permission denied)

Also, messages are appended to stacktrace.log– so it will continue to grow if you don’t do something about it. One option is to change where your container starts, e.g. have the startup script change to its logs directory. You can also configure your grails app to change the location of the stacktrace.log file or turn it off completely.
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To turn on display of debug log messages in Grails 1.0.2, add this to the bottom of grails-app/conf/Config.groovy:

environments {
  development {
    log4j {
      logger {
         grails."app"="debug,stdout"
      }
    }
  }
}

With Grails 1.0.3 the above will produce an error message like No such property: context for class: java.lang.String

For 1.0.3, use this:

environments {
  development {
    log4j {
      logger {
        grails {
          app="debug"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

In your code, simply use log.debug("my message")

Thanks to the grails-user mailing list for a clue towards this.

The Grails docs talk about testing and have some example test methods but fail to describe some simple but necessary mechanics to get it going. The test methods should be in a class that extends GroovyTestCase (that word doesn’t appear at all when searching the Grails website). The class name must end with Tests since it must be in a file with a name ending in Tests.groovy under the test directory of your grails project.
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I’ve started playing with git for source code revision management. Here is my first cut at a .gitignore for a Grails 1.0.3 project. Note that for previous versions you will also need (at least) a line /plugins/core

# .gitignore for Grails 1.0.3

# web application files that are overwritten by "grails upgrade"
#  cf. GRAILS_HOME/scripts/Upgrade.groovy, target( upgrade )
/web-app/WEB-INF

# IDE support files that are overwritten by "grails upgrade"
#  cf. GRAILS_HOME/scripts/CreateApp.groovy, target( createIDESupportFiles )
# to be specific, you could replace "/*" below with your project name,
#  e.g. "foobar.launch" (no slash)
.classpath
.project
.settings
/*.launch
/*.tmproj

# logs
stacktrace.log
/test/reports

# project release file
*.war

Edit: took out build.xml since grails won’t overwrite it. The eclipse dot files .classpath, .project, and .settings will also not be overwritten if they exist, but I’m still ignoring them for now.