grails tomcat mysql ourdelta jndi

Ok, I found information on how to do this a little bit scattered and some gotchas, so this blog post is just a quick idiot's guide on how to setup Grails with a JNDI DataSource on Tomcat 6 with Mysql.

My setup is Ubuntu Jaunty server with Tomcat 6, Sun Java, Mysql 5 & Grails 1.1.1

1. Install Tomcat 6 on Ubuntu Server

apt-get install tomcat6

2. Install Mysql, I use the excellent http://ourdelta.org release

wget -q http://ourdelta.org/deb/ourdelta.gpg -O- | apt-key add -
wget http://ourdelta.org/deb/sources/jaunty-ourdelta.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ourdelta.list
apt-get update
apt-get install mysql-server libmysql-java

3. Install mysql connector into Tomcat

ln -s /usr/share/java/mysql.jar /usr/share/tomcat6/lib/mysql.jar

4. Create a file /var/lib/tomcat6/conf/Catalina/localhost/ROOT.xml and add the following (don't put anything in main server.xml like I had in previous versions of this blog). If you are not deploying to root, then change the name of file and docBase.

<Context docBase="ROOT" path="" reloadable="true">
    <Resource
        name="jdbc/mydatasource"
        auth="Container"
        type="javax.sql.DataSource"
        username="myusername"
        password="mypassword"
        driverClassName="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
        url="jdbc:mysql://localhost/mydatabase"
    />
</Context>

If you have a Context already - just add the above section to it. You can also put this in the context with your war - but I personally like having it in the context outside so that you easier modify.

5. Now over in your grails application, add something like this for your environment to your grails-app/conf/DataSource.groovy:

production {
    dataSource {
        pooled = false
        dbCreate = "update"
        jndiName = "jdbc/mydatasource"
    }
}