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Kill the Terminal and disable its session restoration

· 2 min read
Doko
Doko
Writer

The problem​

When developing apps using React Native, I realized that every time the packager opens, it will spawn a new process of Terminal (Mac OS built-in shell app). This behavior is not too complicated to deal with if you are only using in local development. Right click > Quit and everything will be done.

But with CI / CD, it's another story.

Basically, by the end of the Pipeline / Job in CI (in this example, Gitlab), we need to kill the Terminal and its associated process node:

killall -9 node || true
killall -9 Terminal || true

By default, Terminal will restore itself first after being quit. Which leads to multiple redundant Terminal windows opened at the same time, consuming significant resources.

The solution​

  1. You have to quit Terminal and node first, yes, the command above:
killall -9 node || true
killall -9 Terminal || true
  1. Trigger this command in the CI job:
rm -rf ~/Library/Saved\ Application\ State/com.apple.Terminal.savedState/*

This will delete all saved states created by Terminal earlier.

  1. This is optional: Lock the folder so that the state won't be spawned:
chflags uchg ~/Library/Saved\ Application\ State/com.apple.Terminal.savedState/