Groovy on OS X and MacPorts

Update Note: This is still the case with Groovy 1.6.x and Leopard the same fix still works.

The default MacPorts install of groovy didn't work out of the box. When I ran groovy from the prompt I got a nasty java.lang.SecurityException.

The problem ended up being that my Java CLASSPATH included classes.jar.

The solution ended up clearing out the CLASSPATH system variable altogether before invoking groovy. You can do this with a command line switch but the easiest way to do it was to edit the startGroovy file (found in the /bin directory of the groovy installation). A fast way to find this is using Spotlight

I simply added CLASSPATH= as the first thing in the file:

...
 ##
 ## $Revision: 4298 $
 ## $Date: 2006-12-04 02:39:45 +0100 (Mo, 04 Dez 2006) $
 ##

 CLASSPATH=

 PROGNAME=`basename "$0"`
...