There are two different kinds of apps:
Apps with a graphical user interface, which have a launcher,
and command line tools, which are registered on the PATH to be run in a shell.
Some apps have a graphical user interface and come with a launcher
but are available as a command line tool too.
Launcher for Apps with Graphical UI
Apps with a graphical user interface come with a launcher. The launcher for an app appears as an icon in the Bench Dashboard. To start the app a double click on the icon is enough. Additionally, launchers appear as shortcuts in the launcher directory.
Passing Arguments to Launchers
A lot of programs accept the path to a file or a directory as a command line argument. For an editor this typically means the file is opened when the program starts. When dragging a file or a directory from the desktop or the explorer onto a launcher, both the shortcuts and the dashboard icons, the path of the file or directory is passed as a command line argument to the starting program. This is a comfortable way for opening a file in a Bench app.
Executing Command Line Tools
Command line tools usually have no launcher, because they require additional command line arguments to be useful. Therefore, they are typically run from a shell. To run a command line tool inside the Bench environment, open a Bench shell and type the name of the apps executable.
E.g. to run Git in a Bench environment
open the Bench Dashboard, click on the shell button of your choice
(PowerShell, CMD, or Bash) and type git --version on the shell.
If the Bench environment is configured to integrate into the Windows user profile,
by setting the configuration property RegisterInUserProfile
to true, the command line tools in Bench can be run from every regular shell.
Because Bench then puts its apps on the environment varibale PATH
of the user profile.
Running App via Bench CLI
To run a Bench app from a script which is not necessarily started in the
Bench environment, the Bench CLI can be utilized.
Use the command bench app exec
to start the main executable of a Bench app.
The Bench CLI takes care of providing the correct environment variables
to the starting program.
To print the version of Git in a Bench environment in C:\bench
you can use the following command:
C:\bench\auto\bin\bench.exe app exec Bench.Git --version
All additional arguments after the apps ID are passed as command line arguments to the apps main executable.
See Also
Tech Guides
Reference Docs