Announcing Stark Security Plugin for Grails

I’m happy to announce the release of the new Stark Security plugin to the Grails plugins repository. It’s a cleaned-up (and, hopefully, simplified) edition of the alternative Spring Security plugin previously mentioned here. The main focus of this plugin is to provide a simple yet strong security solution, and it’s different from the standard acegi and jsecurity plugins in that it offers:

  • Lock-down or ‘pessimistic’ approach. Instead of leaving the web application open and relying on configured rules to lock down certain areas, the Stark Security plugin locks down everything by default. Developers open up access on a controller-method basis as they are coding the controllers.
  • Authorization mappings by convention. The determination of which roles can access which URLs is declared by convention in every controller, right next to the eventual URL end-points (controller methods). This makes for very straight-forward implementation and maintenance of the security rules.

Version 0.1 is available by simply running this from within your Grails project:

grails install-plugin stark-security

Documentation is available at the Stark Security Plugin page at the Grails plugins web site.