Grails on Debian Lenny

Grails is an open source web application framework which uses the Groovy programming language (which is in turn based on the Java platform). It is intended to be a high-productivity framework by following the “coding by convention” paradigm, providing a stand-alone development environment and hiding much of the configuration detail from the developer.

Wikipedia

Install java-sdk/jdk:

:~$ sudo aptitude install openjdk6-jdk

http://www.grails.org/Download
Download grails.zip package, unzip and move to /usr/local/

:~$ unzip grails.zip
:~$ sudo mv grails-1.2.3.4/ /usr/local/

Symlink grails-1.2.3.4 to grails:

:/usr/local/$ sudo ln -s grails-1.2.3.4/ grails

Export paths to enviroment:

:~$ export GRAILS_HOME=/usr/local/grails
:~$ export PATH=${PATH}:${GRAILS_HOME}/bin
:~$ export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk

To set the variables edit either (whether you want system wide changes or not):
/etc/profile or ~/.profile / ~/.bash_rc (~/.profile is disregarded if ~/.bash_rc exist! )

Example /etc/profile:

# GRAILS ENVIRONMENT
export GRAILS_HOME=/usr/local/grails
export PATH=${PATH}:${GRAILS_HOME}/bin
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk


:~$ grails create-app YourApp

References: http://wiki.debian.org/Java