add support for background jobs of indefinite length

[masukomi]

⚡ Summary

support background jobs where you don't care how long it takes or if it finishes successfully

Value

Sometimes a git interaction should kick off a process, but you you don't want to have to wait for that process to finish and you don't really care if it finishes successfully.

admittedly silly example:

lolcommits allows you to snap a picture whenever you make a commit. It also allows you to generate N seconds worth of animated gif. If you capture 3 seconds worth of video on every commit, then you'll have to wait an additional 3 seconds for lefthook to finish. Yes, this can be worked around via a wrapper script that bash forks but that's not the point. I'm just trying to give you a simple example and show why it'd be nice to not have to work around the lack of background job support.

Behavior and configuration changes

• add support for a background: true key and documentation that says that the output of backgrounded tasks will not be considered.
• indicate that the task has been started like any other
• fork the process so that the normal lefthook invocation can exit and you can get on with whatever you were doing while the background process runs.

[mrexox]

Sounds good! Thank you for the feature request. Currently I don't have enough resources (time and power) to implement this feature, but if you want to try Go and contribute to the open source project - I'll be glad to help!

[mrexox]

By the way, have you considered using & at the end of the command?

long-running:
  commands:
    loong:
      run: sleep 1000 &

lefthook run long-running
╭────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ 🥊 lefthook v1.6.7  hook: long-running │
╰────────────────────────────────────────╯
┃  loong ❯



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summary: (done in 0.00 seconds)
✔️   loong