Installing Groovy

Before installing Groovy itself, you need a working Java Development Kit (JDK 8 or newer) on your machine, because every Groovy script ultimately compiles to JVM bytecode and executes on that same JVM. Once a JDK is in place and JAVA_HOME is set correctly, you have three realistic paths to installing Groovy: the SDKMAN version manager (the approach the Groovy project itself recommends), a manual download of the binary distribution from groovy-lang.org, or an OS package manager such as Homebrew, apt, or Chocolatey. Whichever route you take, the end result is the same: a GROOVY_HOME environment variable pointing at the installation, and that installation's bin directory added to your PATH so the groovy command is available from any terminal.

SDKMAN is a command-line tool for managing parallel versions of JVM-based SDKs, and it is the most convenient way to install and manage Groovy because it handles GROOVY_HOME and PATH configuration automatically. After installing SDKMAN itself with curl -s "https://get.sdkman.io" | bash, you install Groovy with sdk install groovy, which fetches the latest stable release. You can list every available version with sdk list groovy, install a specific one with sdk install groovy 4.0.15, and switch which version is active in your current shell with sdk use groovy 4.0.15, or set a project-wide default with sdk default groovy 4.0.15. This makes it trivial to work on one project pinned to Groovy 3.x while another project uses Groovy 4.x, without any manual environment-variable juggling.

If you prefer not to use a version manager, you can download the binary distribution zip directly from groovy-lang.org, unzip it to a directory of your choice (for example /opt/groovy-4.0.15), and then manually set GROOVY_HOME to that path and add $GROOVY_HOME/bin to your PATH in your shell's profile file. On macOS, Homebrew offers a much shorter path with brew install groovy, which configures the necessary paths for you. On Debian/Ubuntu-based Linux, Groovy is available via SDKMAN or manual install (Groovy is not consistently packaged in default apt repositories), and on Windows, Chocolatey users can run choco install groovy. Regardless of the method, restarting your terminal (or re-sourcing your shell profile) is necessary before the groovy command becomes available.

Once installed, the fastest way to confirm everything is wired correctly is to run groovy -version in a fresh terminal, which should print the installed Groovy version alongside the JVM version it's running on. For interactive exploration, groovysh launches a REPL (read-eval-print loop) where you can type one Groovy statement at a time and see results immediately - useful for quickly testing an expression like [1,2,3].sum(). For a graphical alternative, groovyConsole opens a small GUI text editor where you can write, run, and inspect the output of multi-line scripts. Finally, you can run any saved .groovy file directly from the command line with groovy path/to/script.groovy, which is the same mechanism used to execute a Groovy script in production or CI environments.