Grails and dynamic modifications at runtime

A deployable Grails war-File contains groovy files as well as a groo开发者_开发问答vy.jar.

• Is there a groovy agent running when the application is deployed?
• Is it possible to make dynamic modifications for the application via Groovy at runtime?
• if yes, how can this be prevented?

Edit: After the grails application war is deployed on let's say on Tomcat: Is there some kind of Groovy Shell/Process/Agent running where someone who has access to the system can connect to? And if this is possible can he make dynamic modifications to the application without touching any files on the file system?

You can use the Console plugin which provides a web-based version of the Groovy Console/Grails Console. Like the Swing-based app it has a ctx variable in scope to give you access to all of the app's Spring beans, and it will run arbitrary Groovy code in the context of your running web app, can access GORM, etc.

Obviously this is dangerous, so be sure to guard it with a security plugin

I wrote a blog post a while back about using a similar web-based console (which I've since merged into the plugin) to fix a bug in a running server: http://burtbeckwith.com/blog/?p=155

By default Grails apps do not ship with a console that will let you execute arbitrary Groovy code at runtime.