How to emit an OSX console application from AIR export release build?

Question

If i run the EXPORT RELEASE BUILD in flash builder, i end up getting a file with an .app suffix.

I can go to the command line and run that by doing open myapp.app which launches it.

My question is this, what if i want to make a headless app, that doesn't open a window (by changing the xml parameters to not open a window at the start), but how do it get that app to run. If i go to the OSX command line and say the file name ./myapp.app it won't run it.

So i take it there is a difference between a file of .app and a command line program. How does one create using AIR a command line type of app? is it even possible to mark an .app to be "console style". I notice that in XCODE you can select a command line project, surely someone must have wrestled with this before.

thanks in advance

zwetan_uk · Answer

Adobe AIR produce GUI apps, not CLI apps.

Now, depending on what you want to do and how you want to do it you can

launch an AIR app but hide the GUI, eg. start NativeWindow visible=false
launch an AIR app that call other command-line apps with NativeProcess
do not use Adobe AIR but use something else that produce a real command-line executable

in any case Adobe AIR, even if you hide the window etc. will never be a truly headless app,

if you don't have a GUI driver it will simply not work, also it will not behave like a command-line app

where you would be able to access standard streams like stdin, stdout, stderr etc.

so I would ask first, what are you trying to do?

and then if you need to build a CLI app based our of ActionScript 3
and that use the same engine than Adobe AIR or Flash but without GUI rendering
I would advise to look into Redtamarin and as3shebang

GitHub - Corsaair/redtamarin: AS3 running on the command line / server side

GitHub - Corsaair/as3shebang: as3shebang – The ActionScript 3.0 Interpreter

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