Starting an application starts it as a background process

Octopus Cloud
, , ,
1

When trying to open a window for the logged in user using Octopus, the application is instead opened as a background process with no visible window.

Start-Process chrome.exe

The response from octopus support is that this is not supported since Octopus runs as a background service, and so you cannot open any windows. We found a solution to that problem in the following code.

Input Parameters:
#{BinaryPath}
#{ErrorOnNonExist} = True
#{User} – the user account to run this application under

Code:

if ($ErrorOnNonExist -eq "False") {
	Write-Host "Looking for [$BinaryPath]"
    $pathFound = Test-Path $BinaryPath
    
    if (!$pathFound) {
    	Write-Host "File not found: [$BinaryPath]"
        return
    }
}

$taskName = "Start Process"
$taskWaitSeconds = 3

Get-ScheduledTask -TaskName $taskName -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Unregister-ScheduledTask $taskName -Confirm:$false
$triggerTime = (Get-Date).AddSeconds($taskWaitSeconds).ToString("HH:mm:ss")

$action = New-ScheduledTaskAction -execute $BinaryPath
$trigger = New-ScheduledTaskTrigger -once -at $triggerTime
Register-ScheduledTask -User $User -action $action -trigger $trigger -taskname $taskname -description "OctopusDeploy Start-Process workaround"

Write-Host "Starting [$BinaryPath]"
Start-Sleep -s $taskWaitSeconds #needed in case there are 2+ steps of this run one after the other

Just wanted to share this solution we found.

3

Hi @jose.gonzalez07,

Thanks for sharing this, hopefully this will come in handy for others users too.

Best regards,
Paul