Should be the equivalent of spawn=true in Ant Java task.

Related forum issue: http://forums.gradle.org/gradle/topics/does_javaexec_task_support_spawning_the_jvm_in_a_new_process_which_will_outlive

Are there any updates to this ticket? Can we include in 1.1 release?

@Pablo, it probably won't make it into the 1.1 release. We'll try and see if we can squeeze it in.

There are some pretty simple work-arounds:

• You can use the Ant <java> task, with fork = true and spawn = true
• You can use the JVM's ProcessBuilder to start the process (don't forget to close the process' stdin, stderr and stdout streams after you launch it).
• You can use the Groovy execute() method, as a slightly more convenient way to start a process:

def process = ['java', '-cp', 'some-path', 'SomeMainClass', 'arg'].execute()
process.in.close()
process.out.close()
process.err.close()

Thank you Adam we'll try those out. Please keep us posted.

Any chance to get this fixed?
It would be great i.e. to launch GWT superdev mode within the IDE and still have its gradle integration available for other useful things (like dependencies resolution). Also switching the java execution code to ant calls is not so painless because of issues related to different classpath definition.

I would really love this. This is now the second round of searching where I have this exact need.

Actually, what I also need, is the ability to fire off a process which spawns threads - and when the main-thread returns, I want the task to be finished. However, the threads run on in the background.

This is obviously going to be used for integration tests - whereby I start up e.g. a "self-contained Jetty" in a main method, and then when the application is up, the main method exits, and I can go for the tests.

Using ant.java, I can get this "when main method exits, the task is done" feature (by having both fork and spawn = false), but I ran into some other issues then (both that it runs within a restrictive security manager not e,g, allowing MBeans to be registered)..

Also using the ant.java, I can spawn it totally, but then I both loose the standard output, and I would need to implement some shaky polling strategy to check if the thing has come up. (Full fork/spawn/disown is also very good in itself - to e.g. on command line do a full build and then spawn the result - and exit Gradle. But when I need the spawn to just exist for the duration of the rest of the build, to interact with it from the rest of the build script for testing, the full fork is not the right solution.)

https://plugins.gradle.org/plugin/com.wiredforcode.spawn

As announced on the Gradle blog we are planning to completely migrate issues from JIRA to GitHub.

We intend to prioritize issues that are actionable and impactful while working more closely with the community. Many of our JIRA issues are inactionable or irrelevant. We would like to request your help to ensure we can appropriately prioritize JIRA issues you’ve contributed to.

Please confirm that you still advocate for your JIRA issue before December 10th, 2016 by:

• Checking that your issues contain requisite context, impact, behaviors, and examples as described in our published guidelines.
• Leave a comment on the JIRA issue or open a new GitHub issue confirming that the above is complete.

We look forward to collaborating with you more closely on GitHub. Thank you for your contribution to Gradle!

The issue is now tracked on GitHub: https://github.com/gradle/gradle/issues/1367