Hi guys! Is there any way to launch a desktop app on system startup? At least on Windows and macOS?

# compose-desktop

[Vincent]

Hi guys! Is there any way to launch a desktop app on system startup? At least on Windows and macOS?

[Alexander Maryanovsky]

It’s out of scope for Compose itself, but you can look into launching apps on startup in general, or maybe JVM apps in particular.

[eskatos]

I had to do this for my app. And it boiled down to do it myself per platform.

[eskatos]

On windows it is a registry key away e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/a/385797

[eskatos]

On mac, creating a plist file in the right directory was enough https://stackoverflow.com/a/3358472

[eskatos]

I intend to do it for linux as well. It should be possible according to this but I'm not sure how well this is supported across DEs https://specifications.freedesktop.org/autostart-spec/autostart-spec-latest.html

[Vincent]

Thank you! I'll look into it

[mikehearn]

It can sometimes be done by packaging tools. If you use Conveyor it's one line of config:

https://conveyor.hydraulic.dev/13.1/configs/windows/#appwindowsstart-on-login

[mikehearn]

But only for Windows ... for macOS/Linux it's not done.

[eskatos]

Yep, in my use case it's not the default and users control if the app is started on launch. In any case I prefer to handle this in the app code

[Alexander Maryanovsky]

You can launch it always (with a special flag), and then have the app check whether it should start on launch and shut down if not.

[eskatos]

Yeah I understand but ... meh 🙂

[Alexander Maryanovsky]

It’s an imperfect world 🤷‍♂️

[eskatos]

Indeed, and that's perfectly fine

[Vincent]

I’m building a library (wip) to handle easily launch at login on JVM target:
• Windows uses registry Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Run
• MacOS uses .plist file in LaunchAgents folder
• Linux to be done
And I will add the possibility to add custom flags. If you want to take a look: https://github.com/vinceglb/AutoLaunch

[Vincent]

It’s great, but we need to know the location of our app in the system in order to config AutoLaunch properly.
• On Windows it’s the MyApp.exe location
• On macOS it’s something like MyApp/Contents/MacOS/MyApp location
I don't know how to get during runtime the location of this file. In Flutter, they have something like Platform.resolvedExecutable for this. Do you know how I can get this?

[eskatos]

I'm using:

val ownExecutable = File(ProcessHandle.current().info().command().get())

val isRunningFromDistributable: Boolean =
    ownExecutable.nameWithoutExtension != "java"

[Vincent]

Oh it’s working great! I was struggling on that, thank you 🙏