Ruby On Windows - Forking other processes

While moving our VM deployment site written in Sinatra to a Windows machine with the VMware PowerCLI toolkit installed the only snag was where we forked a process to do the preparation of the machines. Both Kernel.fork and Process.detach seemed to have issues.

Original MRI on Linux

def build
  pid = fork { run_command }
  Process.detach(pid)
end

def run_command
  `sudo /opt/script/deployserver/setupnewserver.sh -p #{poolserver} -i #{ip} -s #{@size} -v #{@vlan} -a "#{@owner}" -n #{@name} -e "#{@email}"`
end

IronRuby

We tried IronRuby and the same bit of the script broke as on win32 MRI (though I was pleased and surprised that Sinatra worked)

def build
  WindowsProcess.start "C:\\Windows\\System32\\WindowsPowerShell\\v1.0\\powershell.exe",
"-PSConsoleFile \"C:\\Program Files (x86)\\VMware\\Infrastructure\\vSphere PowerCLI\\vim.psc1\" \"& C:\\script\\DataStoreUsage.ps1\""
end

Using the following DotNet code

class WindowsProcess
  def self.start(file, arguments)
    process = System::Diagnostics::Process.new
    process.StartInfo.FileName = file
    process.StartInfo.CreateNoWindow = true
    process.StartInfo.Arguments = arguments
    process.Start
  end
end

Workaround using Windows “start” command

I had hoped the module at win32utils would let me just use the original script but fork did not work properly still. ruby def build commandstr = "C:\\Windows\\System32\\WindowsPowerShell\\v1.0\\powershell.exe -PSConsoleFile \"C:\\Program Files (x86)\\VMware\\Infrastructure\\vSphere PowerCLI\\vim.psc1\" \"& C:\\Sites\\vmdeploy\\PrepNewMachine.ps1 -type #{@type} -machinename #{@name} -size #{@size} -vlan #{@vlan} -creator #{@owner} -creatoremail #{@email} -ipaddress #{ip}" system ("start #{commandstr} > ./log/#{@name}.log 2>&1") end This uses the windows “start” command and works pretty well.