Stdout and stderr from sbt commands is gone forever

[BritishPearl]

The underlying sbt server is launched with stdin/out/err all pointing to /dev/null:

    Command::new("sbt")
        .stdin(Stdio::null())
        .stdout(Stdio::null())
        .stderr(Stdio::null())
        .spawn()

and thus the output from commands like sbt test or sbt it is unavailable, only the logs ([info] etc.). Is there any way to circumvent this limitation?

[cb372]

Thanks for the report. How about adding command-line options to write stdout and stderr to files?

e.g. sbt-client -stdout out.txt -stderr err.txt test

The only problem is that these options would be ignored if the sbt server is already running, which is potentially confusing behaviour.

[cb372]

See also #1 and #7, which are variants of the same problem: any options we take on the command line will only take effect if sbt-client starts an sbt server because it's not already running. Unless we can somehow detect if an sbt server is running, but with different arguments? In that case we could kill the server and start a new one.

[dwijnand]

You might want to hold off introducing new UX here, given sbt/sbt#5319 is coming (at some point, hopefully), which would mostly subsume this client (AFAICT).

[BritishPearl]

@cb372 yes, -stdout/-stdin options would be nice... or even just -inherit-stdout/-inherit-stdin that would make sbt-client use Stdio::inherit instead of Stdio::null :)

[BritishPearl]

If it comes to server already running... yeah, possibly a check of the arguments of the existing server instance + an option like -restart-if-different-options