Debugging Grails tests with Intellij

29 December 2014

I was having some real headaches with debugging my unit tests today. With the introduction of forked execution came the breakage of Intellij debugging.

There are some rather long winded ways of applying remote debuggers, and Ted does a great job of breaking the problem down and offering a solution. However, in my rather tiny Grails application I was happy to sacrifice the benefits of forked execution - at least for my tests.

So, in BuildConfig.groovy I changed the following block:

grails.project.fork = [
    test: [maxMemory: 768, minMemory: 64, debug: false, maxPerm: 256, daemon:true],
    run: [maxMemory: 768, minMemory: 64, debug: false, maxPerm: 256, forkReserve:false],
    war: [maxMemory: 768, minMemory: 64, debug: false, maxPerm: 256, forkReserve:false],
    console: [maxMemory: 768, minMemory: 64, debug: false, maxPerm: 256]
]

to:

grails.project.fork = [
    test: false,
    run: [maxMemory: 768, minMemory: 64, debug: false, maxPerm: 256, forkReserve:false],
    war: [maxMemory: 768, minMemory: 64, debug: false, maxPerm: 256, forkReserve:false],
    console: [maxMemory: 768, minMemory: 64, debug: false, maxPerm: 256]
]

This change tells Grails that when we run the test configuration it shouldn’t run in forked mode - this is anything we would run using the test-app Grails command.