Open URL In Browser
Explore how to open URLs in a web browser from a Node.js script, supporting both Windows and Mac platforms. Understand how to create child processes with spawn and exec functions to run browser commands conditionally based on the operating system. By the end, you will be able to automate browser-opening tasks with flexible scripting that handles different OS environments.
We'll cover the following...
Not everyone uses the same operating system. Different CLIs have different commands. For example, the command to list the content of a directory on a Unix-based operating system is ls, whereas, on Windows, it is dir. In this lesson, I will show you how to support both Windows and Mac when using the os module to open a browser with a URL.
This time though, you will need to spawn a new child process to handle the execution of the browser opening process. Creating a new sub-process requires enough memory in which both the child process and the current program can be executed.
Child processes
A process is an instance of a computer program running on your operating system. It contains the program code and its activity. A ...