Grails and Tomcat 7 Datasource

This should be fast and easy. You want a shared datasource on your Tomcat 7 server, which you can change without deploying a new Grails war and that is shared between all your Grails applications on this same Tomcat server.

You have to configure your DataSource.groovy file with this:

production{
    pooled = false
    dbCreate = "update"
    jndiName = "java:comp/env/jdbc/MyGrailsDS"
}

Generate your war, place it for deployment and go configure the conf/context.xml file on your Tomcat server.

<Resource name="jdbc/MyGrailsDS" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource" username="abc" password="abc" driverClassName="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver" url="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/my_grails_schema"/>

Start your Tomcat 7 server and enjoy. Now you can change the database your applications point at by simply changing the configuration on the context.xml file.