Since the latest Grails versions a Grails wrapper is automatically created when we execute the create-app command. If we don't want the wrapper to be created we can use the command argument --skip-wrapper. If later we changed our mind and want the Grails wrapper we can simply run the wrapper command from our Grails application directory.

Let's run the create-app command with the --skip-wrapper argument. If we check the contents of the created directory we see that the wrapper files are not created:

$ grails create-app --skip-wrapper sample
$ cd sample
$ ls
application.properties lib   src   web-app
grails-app  scripts   test
$

Written with Grails 2.4.4.

Original blog post