Tom's Blog

I installed Groovy 1.6 on Fedora from an RPM as offered on the Groovy download page and immediately got an exception stack trace when running groovysh or groovyConsole. I installed the groovy-1.6.0-2.noarch.rpm file, kindly packaged by Federico Pedemonte, then tried to run groovyConsole:

[tom@dev ~]$ groovyConsole 
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/codehaus/groovy/tools/GroovyStarter
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.codehaus.groovy.tools.GroovyStarter
	at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:200)
	at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
	at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:188)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:307)
	at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:301)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:252)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(ClassLoader.java:320)
Could not find the main class: org.codehaus.groovy.tools.GroovyStarter.  Program will exit.

I then tried to run groovysh with no better luck:

[tom@dev ~]$ groovysh 
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/codehaus/groovy/tools/GroovyStarter
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.codehaus.groovy.tools.GroovyStarter
	at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:200)
	at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
	at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:188)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:307)
	at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:301)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:252)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(ClassLoader.java:320)
Could not find the main class: org.codehaus.groovy.tools.GroovyStarter.  Program will exit.

The problem turned out to be quite simple to solve: a missing GROOVY_HOME. The packager adds the environment variable GROOVY_HOME to the shell by adding the file /etc/profile.d/groovy.sh so bash picks it up at startup via the /etc/profile script, but my current shell hadn't had a chance to read in that file yet.

The solution was as easy as exiting and starting a new shell, or manually setting:

[tom@dev ~]$ export GROOVY_HOME=/usr/share/groovy
[tom@dev ~]$ groovyConsole

and everything works.


Saturday March 21, 2009 Permalink Comments [0]