Grails 4: How to add Java JAR files to Grails project | How to add an external library or JAR file that is not a grails plugin to the Grails project

Putting the jar in the lib folder should do the trick. The default lib folder is gone as of Grails 3.0. grails.github.io/grails-doc/3.0.x/guide/single.html#upgrading --> "Dependency resolution should be used to resolve JAR files"

If Grails by default don't take the local .jar libraries located in <GRAILS-APP-DIR>/lib (seems that with Grails >= 3.X the /lib folder default configuration is removed) the easy way to enforce it is modifying build.gradle to add a local directory dependency for it.

For almost all cases is of course better to use the maven repos, but in some cases it's possible to have some other libraries which aren't in a public repo. To do so we have to add these libraries in some lib folder then modify the <GRAILS-APP-DIR>/build.gradle and add something like:

dependencies { ... // lib folder or any other name one can use compile fileTree(dir: './lib', include: ['*.jar']) ... }

If you want you can use another directory (not /lib) since you're specifying it. Of course use the correct scope (for example for jars which probably already are in your application container class path the scope will be runtime instead of compile)

You can download and drop the jar file into the grails-app/lib directory directly. This should be carefully maintained by someone time to time. Other developers working on the same project might not be aware of its presence. Plus you cannot easily upgrade versions in a transparent manner.