As a starter, download the Groovy 2.0 binaries as described in the Installing Groovy on Windows recipe and perform the following steps to install Groovy on Linux and OS X:

The output should display the installed Groovy version and the JDK in use.

Using the symbolic link called current, which we created in step 2, makes it very easy to upgrade to a newer version of Groovy by changing the folder to which the symbolic link points to.

Most *nix-based operating systems (such as Linux or Mac OS X) have package manager systems that allow you to install Groovy by simply typing a command in the terminal.

In Ubuntu, Groovy can be installed by simply typing:

sudo apt-get install groovy

The version installed by the Ubuntu package manager is quite old (1.7.10), so you may want to install Groovy manually as described in this recipe.

In OS X, you can use Homebrew as follows:

brew install groovy

If you are happy with running a stable version of Groovy, but possibly not the most recent one, a package manager is the recommended way to get Groovy quickly and easily. If you want to install a beta version of Groovy or a version that is not yet available on the package manager system used by your OS, install the binaries from the website.