Starting multiple terminals on start up of dev containers

[MikeyBower93]

Hello, I'm looking at creating a devcontainer.json definition for a mono repo, where there will be a couple of backend projects and a frontend project. One thing I would like to do is when the dev container starts it opens up a terminal for each of the projects (perhaps with a name for each terminal) and physically starts the codebase for each of the projects in the mono repo. This will mean as soon as somebody opens up the mono repo in a dev container they will have the entire codebase running.

Lets take an example just to illustrate this further. Imagine we have a mono repo called test in git, which had the following sub folders

• serviceA - (a nodeJS express application)
• serviceB - (a nodeJS express application)
• frontend - (a react application)

I would like it that when the dev container starts up it would start 3 terminals

• A terminal called serviceA which is running serviceA perhaps with something like npm start
• exactly the same as above but for serviceB
• A terminal called frontend which is running frontend perhaps with something like npm start

I couldn't quite find a way to do this in the reference (https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/devcontainerjson-reference), however it does seem like something that can be done in Gitpod with "tasks".

Thank you for any feedback/information.

[skaramicke]

I want the same thing.

I have a Wordpress plugin with a docker-compose that spins up a DB and Wordpress. The plugin has a public JS part and an admin JS part in two separate folders with a package.json, webpack.conf.js files and such each.
I want to automatically start three terminals;

1. docker-compose up
2. cd public && npm i && npm run dev
3. cd admin && npm i && npm run dev

This was easy to do in gitpod;

tasks:
  - name: Docker Compose
    init: docker-compose pull
    command: docker-compose up

  - name: Public JS
    before: cd public
    command: |
      npm i
      npm run dev
  - name: Admin JS
    before: cd admin
    command: |
      npm i
      npm run dev

[vkrivtsov-stuzo]

this feature is very important to make painless starting environment after shutdown or restart of workspace, otherwise it requires to start many tasks again and again

[alexcochran]

It seems like a tasks.json file could help here.