Is it possible to run a command defined in pipeline in a separate terminal / console?

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Hi guys,

I am running Jenkins in an OSX EC2 instance and everything is working fine. I have one particular requirement which I am currently working for quite sometime. Let me explain the scenario in simple words. I have a pipeline script like below;

pipeline {
    agent {
        label 'master'
    }
    tools {
        nodejs "node-v14.17.5"
    }
    stages {
        stage('stage1') {
            steps {
                dir("dir_a"){
                    sh 'command_a'
                }
                dir("dir_b"){
                    sh 'command_b'
                }
            }
        }
        stage('stage2') {
            steps {
                dir("dir_c"){
                    sh 'command_c'
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

This might looks fine, but I have one requirement. command_a in stage_1 should be running all the time, because command _b and command_c are depending on that. Basically command_a is yarn start which is required for IOS app build. Now, I can very well proceed with the pipeline by replacing command_a with something like nohup command_a >> command_a.log & . But when I try this command locally, the server (the command actually starts metro server) starts, but it will get stuck in the middle. I figured out that the server need to run in foreground, which will not return the control back to console.

In real world, without Jenkins, the process works like this;

  1. I open up a terminal and execute command_a in it. The process will run in foreground.
  2. I open up a another terminal and run command_b and command_c in it, which works well.

Then I thought of writing a script, which automatically launch another terminal from existing terminal and execute the required command in it. I ended up creating a script like this;

osascript -e 'tell app "Terminal" to do script "cd /workspace/MyPipeline/dir_a && command_a"'

This worked well in the mac terminal. It will execute the command in a separate terminal after going to the specified directory. The equivalent jenkins script I included in the pipeline is like below;

sh 'osascript -e \'tell app "Terminal" to do script "cd /workspace/MyPipeline/dir_a && command_a"\''

But it returned an error like below;

execution error: An error of type -10826 has occurred. (-10826)

So, my question is, is there any possibility to achieve executing one command while running another command in foreground using Jenkins pipeline? Basically, two parallel executions.

Thanks in advance.

2

Though you will probably need some way to stop your first process, once command_b and command_c are finished

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