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(Quick Reference) # 4.1.1 Built in options - Reference Documentation Authors: Graeme Rocher, Peter Ledbrook, Marc Palmer, Jeff Brown, Luke Daley, Burt Beckwith, Lari Hotari Version: 2.3.8 ## 4.1.1 Built in options Grails has a set of core settings that are worth knowing about. Their defaults are suitable for most projects, but it's important to understand what they do because you may need one or more of them later. ### Build settings Let's start with some important build settings. Although Grails requires JDK 6 when developing your applications, it is possible to deploy those applications to JDK 5 containers. Simply set the following in `BuildConfig.groovy`:
    grails.project.source.level = "1.5"
    grails.project.target.level = "1.5"
Note that source and target levels are different to the standard public version of JDKs, so JDK 5 -> 1.5, JDK 6 -> 1.6, and JDK 7 -> 1.7. In addition, Grails supports Servlet versions 2.5 and above but defaults to 2.5. If you wish to use newer features of the Servlet API (such as 3.0 async support) you should configure the `grails.servlet.version` setting appropriately:
    grails.servlet.version = "3.0"
### Runtime settings On the runtime front, i.e. `Config.groovy`, there are quite a few more core settings: `grails.config.locations` - The location of properties files or addition Grails Config files that should be merged with main configuration. See the section on externalised config. `grails.enable.native2ascii` - Set this to false if you do not require native2ascii conversion of Grails i18n properties files (default: true). `grails.views.default.codec` - Sets the default encoding regime for GSPs - can be one of 'none', 'html', or 'base64' (default: 'none'). To reduce risk of XSS attacks, set this to 'html'. `grails.views.gsp.encoding` - The file encoding used for GSP source files (default: 'utf-8'). `grails.mime.file.extensions` - Whether to use the file extension to dictate the mime type in Content Negotiation (default: true). `grails.mime.types` - A map of supported mime types used for Content Negotiation. `grails.serverURL` - A string specifying the server URL portion of absolute links, including server name e.g. grails.serverURL="http://my.yourportal.com". See createLink. Also used by redirects. `grails.views.gsp.sitemesh.preprocess` - Determines whether SiteMesh preprocessing happens. Disabling this slows down page rendering, but if you need SiteMesh to parse the generated HTML from a GSP view then disabling it is the right option. Don't worry if you don't understand this advanced property: leave it set to true. `grails.reload.excludes` and `grails.reload.includes` - Configuring these directives determines the reload behavior for project specific source files. Each directive takes a list of strings that are the class names for project source files that should be excluded from reloading behavior or included accordingly when running the application in development with the `run-app` command. If the `grails.reload.includes` directive is configured, then only the classes in that list will be reloaded. ### War generation `grails.project.war.file` - Sets the name and location of the WAR file generated by the war command `grails.war.dependencies` - A closure containing Ant builder syntax or a list of JAR filenames. Lets you customise what libaries are included in the WAR file. `grails.war.copyToWebApp` - A closure containing Ant builder syntax that is legal inside an Ant copy, for example "fileset()". Lets you control what gets included in the WAR file from the "web-app" directory. `grails.war.resources` - A closure containing Ant builder syntax. Allows the application to do any other work before building the final WAR file For more information on using these options, see the section on deployment | Quick Reference (hide)