Also if you're interested in going any deeper it looks like this is the feature that is responsible for it: https://github.com/grails/grails-forge/blob/4db990724e0a5e0ae14a26652eaebfa7264deb[…]ava/org/grails/forge/feature/spring/SpringBootJettyFeature.java Getting this up and running takes a bit of finagling, I contributed one feature a while ago. It took me a while to figure out how it worked and going back to it might take me a while again.