An easy way to launch dotnet run background processes and kill each process and their descendants with a single command.

Install as a .Net Core tool:

dotnet tool install --global DotnetBackground

For each project to be launched, run the tool as if it were run using dotnet command. This example launches two projects, with some dotnet options and arguments passed to the second process:

DotnetBackground run --project project1/project1.csproj
DotnetBackground run --project project2/project2.csproj --no-restore param1 param2

All projects will run in the background under a shell (cmd on windows or bash on unix), producing the following files:

• dotnet-projectN-out.log: the standard output of each project N
• dotnet-projectN-err.log: the standard error output of each project N
• dotnet-background-pids.log: stores the PID of each process to enable kill all processes with a single command

To kill all processes, use a single kill command. If any process has child processes, they will be killed too:

DotnetBackground kill

DotnetBackground allows some additional options that can be added to the command line (these options are not send to dotnet)

• --out <path>: Sets the output folder where the log files are stored. Default is the current folder.
• --name <name>: Sets the name of the process (used to identfy the log files). By default it is the name of the project. Note that if several instances of the the same project are launched, they need to specify different names.

This example launches two instances of the same process with different arguments and moves all logs to the reports folder:

DotnetBackground run --project project1/project1.csproj --name instance1 --out report --no-restore param1
DotnetBackground run --project project1/project1.csproj --name instance2 --out report --no-restore param2

Note that it is not required the projects being previously built, but is recommendable do so when launching multiple instances of the same project to avoid interferences during startup.