Spawn a fire-and-forget process

[Vogel612]

It would be nice to allow spawning a process without terminating it.. ever. So a standalone process that doesn't even clean up after themselves.

Implementation might be as simple as dropping ready as mandatory argument, but you know better than me. I am also willing to open a PR, if necessary 😄

[npetzall]

To my understanding this is already possible. Just executing a SpawnProcessTask and never executing the KillProcessTask will leave the task running.

However you can't start a process that has no output.

[rkrisztian]

The documentation is confusing to me in that regard. It says:

Once the build draws to a close, the stopServer task is then used to gracefully shut down the server process.

What calls the stopServer task? Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm not a native speaker of English), but in my understanding, the sentence implies that something will call it, but I see nothing like that in the source code of the plugin. Or do you mean "can be used"?

Also, you write:

A typical application of this plugin is for stopping and starting an embedded web server when running functional tests from within your build.

So that's like: integrationTest.finalizedBy stopServer.

But for such things, shouldn't we just use the https://github.com/psxpaul/gradle-execfork-plugin? Which makes sure that if you don't specify after which task the process should be stopped, it will be at the end of the build.

But I myself see an important difference between the two plugins, and that's the following use case:

gradle startServer
# execute manual commands needing that server
# and then optionally:
gradle stopServer

You can't do this use case at all with the execfork plugin. And I think the documentation should reflect that more clearly.