It is unbelievably easy to integrate Ivy as a dependency manager for your grails application. Just a couple of steps really (Note: this is for grails >= 1.0 as < 1.0 had ivy integrated):

1. Install the Ivy plugin:
   1. grails install-plugin ivy

   This will create an ivy.xml and an ivyconf.xml, and place them in the project root. I modified my ivy.xml thusly:

   1. <ivy-module version="1.0">
   2.    <info organisation="codehaus" module="grails"/>
   3.    <dependencies>
   4.        <dependency org="mysql" name="mysql-connector-java" rev="5.0.5"/>
   5.    </dependencies>
   6. </ivy-module>
2. You can then run the following command and ivy will place your dependencies in the lib folder of your project root:
   1. grails get-dependencies

That’s it! Now I just need to figure out why they don’t really use this as a selling point for grails. The only thing I can figure is that there are so many great features it would get lost in the list anyway.