Jetty plugin: Auto reloading when source files changes?

I’ve grown accustomed to Grails auto reloading when I save source files. I’m looking to achieve something similar using Gradle and the war + jetty plugin, and it seems that this isn’t possible at the moment.

I attempted to run jetty with daemon: true and set Gradle up so that when the jetty task finished running, I started the watcher plugin and invoked “classes” when stuff in src changed. This worked, except that when you set jetty in daemon mode, it assumes I no longer want auto-watching of compiled class files.

https://github.com/gradle/gradle/blob/REL_2.0/subprojects/jetty/src/main/java/org/gradle/api/plugins/jetty/AbstractJettyRunTask.java#L240

As far as I can tell, the only backwards compatible way to solve this, is to add an additonal flag you can set that tells “daemon = true” to also auto watch, that is false by default. Would a patch like that be welcome?

Are there any other ways of solving this problem?

I’d suggest not starting with the Jetty plugin that comes with Gradle.

This plugin is much more capable: https://github.com/akhikhl/gretty