For general configuration Grails provides a file called grails-app/conf/Config.groovy. This file uses Groovy's ConfigSlurper which is very similar to Java properties files except it is pure Groovy hence you can re-use variables and use proper Java types!

You can add your own configuration in here, for example:

foo.bar.hello = "world"

Then later in your application you can access these settings in one of two ways. The most common is via the GrailsApplication object, which is available as a variable in controllers and tag libraries:

assert "world" == grailsApplication.config.foo.bar.hello

The other way involves getting a reference to the ConfigurationHolder class that holds a reference to the configuration object:

import org.codehaus.groovy.grails.commons.*
…
def config = ConfigurationHolder.config
assert "world" == config.foo.bar.hello