Reminder to halt VM?

Hi there,

I personally do not know such solution.

Anyway, some tickets to watch after:

• https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/PY-11227
• https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/PY-12334
• https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEABKL-5622

P.S. The only thing that comes into my mind right now: have some batch/PowerShell script that will be launched by scheduler (e.g. every 5 mins or so) that will check if there is any PhpStorm process running .. and if not -- attempt to shutdown the VM. Nuance: do not launch actual shutdown code if VM is not running.

Downside is obvious: what if you just restarting IDE .. or temporarily close it etc -- no way to read your mind/intentions.

(just in case: startup tasks are already possible.)

Thanks. Yeah, those tickets are applicable, and I just now voted for them.

That scheduled script sounds like a reasonable idea. I don't need it to actually do the shutdown - it would be sufficient to just alert me that PhpStorm is not running but the VM is. But that sounds like pretty advanced scripting - if it were Linux I might have a hope of figuring out how to write a little cron-run bash script, but Windows under-the-hood stuff is pretty opaque to me. Maybe someday...

PowerShell script would be the best solution here. It's not super hard .. but yes, you would need to spend a bit of time to get into the syntax (as it's differs / unusual at first glance).

General idea is:

• Enumerate running processes looking for PhpStorm.exe or PhpStorm64.exe (may require elevated permissions for that, not sure)
• If found -- make up some marker (e.g. temp file with unique name -- could be in user's Temp folder or whatnot). That's enough to act as a marker (we do not care what PID PhpStorm uses etc)
• If not found: see if marker does exist. If exist (which means IDE was recently closed): delete it and show the required notification.

Some links:

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/getting-started/cookbooks/managing-processes-with-process-cmdlets?view=powershell-6
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.management/get-process?view=powershell-6

P.S. Instead of enumerating running processes you may just look up at what "C:\Users\USERNAME\.PhpStorm2018.1\config\port.lock" file is (the file size). If it's 0 bytes -- IDE is not running; otherwise -- it's running. NOTE: if IDE process is killed in any way (actual kill; crash; hard reboot/power loss) the file most likely still be non-zero length.

Pros:

• No need for process enumeration (so no potential need for admin rights)

Cons:

• Still need to remember the state from past run (to avoid false alarms)
• Path is IDE-version specific
• If you are using more than one IDE version at a time (e.g. stable and next major EAP builds) you would need to perform such checks in more than one place.