Automate Starting Terminal Processes with a Script on macOS/OSX

In larger projects you may have 6 or seven processes running in different terminals. This can be such a pain to setup each time you boot up the system. I use a shell script containing AppleScript to open a new terminal window and then open a new tab and run a command in each.

I use this method to start the Rails server, the jobs server and any other process I need. The script below can be modified for your own needs.

The function runCommandInNewTab accepts a command and the path to change directories to and then execute the specified command. The function creates a new tab in the active new terminal window. The directory is changed to the one provided and then the supplied command is executed with some delays added in.

runCommandInNewTab is called in the main section of the script after a new window has been created. Simply repeat the runCommandInNewTab function with command and path for each process you wish to start.

This is all echoed to osascript to be run. You can include any other scripts to run before this by adding source scriptName.sh before the echo!

Save your script in a file with an .sh extension and ensure it has correct executable rights. You can run the script from the command line like so ./scriptName.sh

#!/bin/sh

echo '
 on run argv
  tell application "Terminal"
   activate
   tell application "System Events"
    keystroke "n" using {command down}
   end tell
  end tell
  runCommandInNewTab("bundle exec rails s -p 3000","/Development/Rails/appname")
  runCommandInNewTab("bundle exec rake jobs:work","/Development/Rails/appname")
 end run

 on runCommandInNewTab(command,path)
  tell application "Terminal"
   activate
   set window_id to id of first window whose frontmost is true
   tell application "System Events"
    keystroke "t" using {command down}
   end tell
   set changeDir to "cd " & quoted form of (path as string)
   delay 1
   do script(changeDir) in window id window_id of application "Terminal"
   delay 2
   set newTab to do script command in window id window_id of application "Terminal"
   delay 2
  end tell
  return newTab
 end runCommandInNewTab

' | osascript - "$@" > /dev/null