Add support for background tasks

[beenje]

Problem description

I found 2 PRs attempting to add background tasks support: #386 and #682

Both were closed, as not complete and having problem supporting windows.

I'd really like this feature!
Opening this issue so it doesn't get forgotten and hoping someone will give it another try :-)

[ruben-arts]

Could you add a use-case and some more information why this is useful to you?

[ytausch]

I am also interested in this feature. My use case is: I want a jupyter task that runs jupyter in the background, and a ui task that starts our business UI (which also runs in the background). ui needs jupyter to be running, otherwise it will fail. With proper pixi integration, I would expect to be able to use depends_on for specifying that jupyter needs to be started before the UI can be run.

[wolfv]

For reference, the PR that @hadim made was really good and we could totally revive it.

[beenje]

To add my use case: I work a lot with tango-controls, which requires a Tango database to be running. For local development, I'd like to run pixi run tango-db to start Databaseds 2 -ORBendPoint giop:tcp:0.0.0.0:10000 in the background. It's then possible to register and run another tango server.

[baszalmstra]

I think this is an excellent idea but Im not sure when we'll get to it. For now I moved it to the ideas discussion board.

[jtroe]

I would also like this functionality, my use case is building Sphinx documentation, then building a Gatsby site which has a GraphQL API that reads the Sphinx JSON.

I have a task pixi run docs:preview which builds the JSON from the code and launches the site. I would like to build then JSON, bootstrap watchdog (e.g. watchmedo shell-command --patterns="*.py;*.rst' --command='make json'), then build and preview the Gatsby site, which looks at the json output without caching when running on local.

This would be super helpful! (And I would be open to alternate suggestions also if you see an easier or better way)

Thanks!

[mtmal]

Hi all,

I’d like to bump this idea and add another concrete use case. In one of our robotics projects, we use pixi extensively. We structure the setup around two main features: ros2 and isaac. On top of these, we define two environments: robot, which depends only on the ros2 feature, and sim, which depends on both ros2 and isaac.

This allows us to launch ROS 2 applications with the appropriate flags, settings, etc., depending on whether they are running on the real robot or in simulation. However, in the simulation case, the simulator itself has to be started first via a separate task.

Being able to run simulations from a single task, one that would first start Isaac Sim, Gazebo, or a similar simulator, and then launch our application, would be very convenient. It would also significantly streamline demos; at the moment, we rely on custom shell scripts to start each application individually.

Thanks!