Launch app from Elixir then exit BEAM. (Personal task scheduler)

Questions / Help
1

Hi,

I need to launch certain apps on work days, I need to run some checks via HTTP APIs and then maybe launch some other apps, etc.

I am not very good with bash, and some complex scenarios will be much simpler to handle with Elixir (call HTTP, parse response, parse a config file, etc).

But is it possible to start an app from an Elixir script (think Slack, Thunderbird, …) and then shutdown the BEAM while the app is still running?

2

It could be, but why not wrap the two together instead?

#!/bin/sh

elixir -S "script.exs" && exec open "http://example.com"

Now all you need to ensure, is that script.exs will exit with non-0 code on error.

However with a little of *NIX magic you could fork the process into the background and leave it running when the parent dies, however I think, than in your case, there are some tools that would handle all of that for you, if you would be so keen to extend about what you need exactly.

1 Like
3

I vote for the normal release and eval/rpc afterward mix release — Mix v1.11.4

2 Likes
4

I need to do some things like:

  • if Slack was not open by the script today already, and if we are in Monday…Friday, then open Slack.
  • If some Gitlab project API returns a non-empty list of issues, then open a tab in Firefox to a certain URL calculated from the issues list.

I know it could be done with unix commands but yeah, I would like to learn how to fork and “unlink” from the parent.