What is Grails Forge?

Grails Forge (at start.grails.org) is the current recommended starting point for a new Grails application — a web-based project generator conceptually similar to Spring Initializr, letting a developer pick options and download a ready-to-build project rather than relying solely on offline CLI commands.

It generates the project's build files, base directory structure, and any selected features or plugins pre-wired, sparing a developer from manually assembling the initial build.gradle, folder layout, and wrapper scripts by hand. Alongside Grails Forge, offline CLI-based application generation still exists for developers who prefer working entirely from the command line without a web step.

Once a project is generated, the only remaining hard requirement to actually build and run it is a JDK — Grails Forge's output already includes the Grails Wrapper, so nothing else needs pre-installing to get the generated application running for the first time.