When you execute: grails create-app appname You might be in a really big directory, as I was this morning. In that case, this line: src/commons/org/codehaus/groovy/grails/cli/GrailsScriptRunner.groovy:185 def plugins = RESOLVER.getResources("file:${baseDir.absolutePath}/**/*GrailsPlugin.groovy") Attempts to search that entire directory tree for GrailsPlugins. This does not scale well. I have millions of files under parts of the tree where I might want to create a Grails application. Suggested fix would be to be more specific about where these plugins can live.