groovysh

I’m a command line person, and I love the interactive nature of Ruby’s irb for extemporaneous coding. Groovy comes with its own analogue, the Groovy Shell (groovysh, which the parallelist in me would like to see renamed to igr).

But JVM ecosystem has rich tools for pulling in and managing dependencies (and transient dependencies). Generally, you can specify new Ivy/Maven/etc. dependencies in the build, or (in Groovy) as @Grab annotations. But trying things out interactively is something that was a bit cumbersome. It could be done, with metaprogramming or making things available to the classpath before executing groovysh, or making an ugly call into the Grab functions inside Groovy.

But that is work. And I am lazy.

Also, these methods wouldn’t allow for auto-completion of imports, so you’d have to type. And I just told you how I feel about working.

grab and smash

I’ve written a small command for the Groovy Shell that allows grabbing dependencies, installing them in the runtime environment, and allowing for import auto-completion.

:load it from your Groovy Shell by URL, and enjoy!

update

Pull request #286 has been merged, so you we should be able to expect the above feature in the standard Groovy core version of groovysh.