I’m experimenting with tasks, more specifically, a task which fires up “rails server” in an external iTerm terminal. This is necessary, because when debugging, the server has to run with a tty attached. (It would be cool, if tasks could run inside a Nova terminal e.g. by adding a “run in terminal” checkbox to the task.)
The simple “run” solution builds a temp script and fires iTerm up with it:
#!/bin/sh
script=$(mktemp)
workdir=$(pwd)
cat > $script << END
source ~/.bash_profile
cd $workdir
bundle exec rails server
END
chmod a+x $script
open -Wa iTerm.app $script
The -W there causes open to wait.
A more complicated and flexible AppleScript looks as follows (first time I write AppleScript, so this is certainly ugly):
#!/bin/sh
workdir=$(pwd)
osascript -i <<END
tell application "iTerm"
activate
if not (exists window 1) then
create window with default profile
else
tell current window
create tab with default profile
end tell
end if
tell current window
tell the current session
write text "cd \"$workdir\""
write text "rails server && exit"
end tell
repeat while exists current tab
delay 1
end repeat
end tell
end tell
END
This should wait due to the repeat loop.
I somewhat expected the square “stop” button to execute the clean script which could be something like:
#!/bin/sh
pkill -f "ruby.*rails server"
So I start the server with “run” alright, but when I click the “stop” button next to it, the clean script is not executed and the server keeps running in the external terminal. However, if I execute “clean” using the command palette, the process is killed and the iTerm tab closed.
Is there a way to solve this more elegantly? Maybe if I write an extension rather than just use the tasks UI?
I guess what I’m missing is a custom “stop” script. And maybe to give the user full control over which task buttons to show: build, start, stop and cleanup. (Btw: Kinda funky IMO that the buttons of disabled tasks are only greyed out rather than removed.)
Thanks for your help!