Running Play service from Gradle - gradle

Question

I am attempting to use a Gradle task to run a Play service, but I'm finding the Gradle task will hang (presumably waiting for a return value from the Play bootstrap script).
What I'm doing from the Play side is simply:
sbt dist
Which produces a .zip distribution (like 'myproject.zip'), which I then expand where I want to run this service from.
On the Gradle side, I was thinking I would do something like this:
task start(type: Exec) {
workingDir "myproject/bin"
commandLine './myproject'
}
This does indeed start up the Play service just fine, but the Gradle task will hang indefinitely (until you do a control+C).
The most obvious thing that came to mind to try was something like:
task start(type: Exec) {
workingDir "myproject/bin"
commandLine 'nohup ./myproject &'
}
But that ends in a dead end:
Execution failed for task ':start'.
> A problem occurred starting process 'command 'nohup ./playservicetemplate &''
It seems like this is a really common use case, so I'm wondering if there is an obvious solution that I'm overlooking.

Answer 1

There is perhaps a more Gradle-ish way to do this, but I solved it by leveraging ProcessBuilder. My new task looks like:
task start {
ProcessBuilder builder = new ProcessBuilder("./myproject")
builder.directory(new File("myproject/bin"))
builder.start()
}
Obviously, you can get a lot fancier with this (a quick Google of 'java processbuilder' will net you pages upon pages of examples), but this will do the trick for my purposes.