title: deploying changes after initial Grails project launch
body: <p>I've launched a small Grails site a few month back and now I have to deploy incremental changes to the app, most of them not involving any db changes. New tags, bug fixes in controllers, services, ect. Right now I'm simply picking through the haggis of classes and artifacts generated by running grails war SOME-WAR.war and manually dropping them into production environment. You're probably right in your sentiments at the moment and believe me this process is quite the punishment in itself.  </p>
  
  <p>Any suggestions on improving upon this? </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Seems like dropping an entire .war file into production every time
  something changes would be an overkill and there's the issue of
  client generated static content.</li>
  <li>For instance uploaded images. At the moment they're in a dir under
  images dir created when the project got initialized, they're not
  stored in db either. I thought about storing them in db for archival
  and backup purposes so they could be written back into a dir should
  something unfortunate happen, but have not gone that far yet.</li>
  </ul>