The Grails plugin ecosystem is quite extensive.  There are currently 240+ plugins available in the repository.  If you're like me, you use many of them in your projects.  One of the issues I've always had is how to easily determine if there is an update available for one of my installed plugins.  Here's a script to do it for you.

Robert Fletcher over at the Ad-Hockery blog, wrote a nice little script appropriately named "CheckPluginVersions".  It's publicly available on GitHub at http://gist.github.com/130031.

Here's how to use it:

1. Download CheckPluginVersions.groovy from http://gist.github.com/130031
2. Copy CheckPluginVersions.groovy into the scripts directory of your Grails application.  The scripts directory is a toplevel directory, at the same level as the grails-app directory.
3. At the command line, cd into your project's home folder and type 'grails check-plugin-versions'.  You should see a nicely formatted report returned to you, similiar to the one shown here:

Plugins with available updates are listed below:
-------------------------------------------------------------
<Plugin>            <Current>         <Available>
fckeditor           0.9.3             0.9.4
mail                0.7               0.7.1

There is no longer a need to manually sift through the results of the list-plugins command and compare them to your projects' installed plugins.

What a timesaver.  Thanks Robert Fletcher!