In Hammerspoon, how to open an app and pass in startup params

Question

I'm trying to make a Hammerspoon hotkey to open and start a daily meeting in Google Meet.

Since I have more than 1 google profile, I need to pass the desired profile in to Chrome at invoke time, using Chrome command-line parameters.

The normal Hammerspoon app launch methods all fail when adding these extra parameters in the launch string.

More specifically, the following works from the command line and has the effect that I want: /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --args --app=https://meet.google.com/some-meeting-id --profile-directory='Profile 1'

But using that string inside of hs.application.open, hs.application.launchOrFocus, or hs.urlevent.openURL all fail.

How to get Hammerspoon to open an app startup command that includes extra parameters like this?

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 14 '21 at 00:58

I came up with a decent workaround:

I bundled the long command line with arguments inside an AppleScript using do shell script, and then saved it as an Application (e.g., StartMeetup.app). After that, Hammerspoon is able to launch with:

hs.application.open("StartMeetup")

However, it would still be very useful to know how to get Hammerspoon to do this directly, without the intermediary script.

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Jul 03 '22 at 08:18

You can use the Hammerspoon task function to open a new tab in that profile:

function ChromeWithProfile()
  local profile = "Profile 4"
  local url = "https://meet.google.com"
  local t = hs.task.new("/Applications/Google Chrome.app/contents/MacOS/Google Chrome", 
  nil,
  function() return false end,
  { "--profile-directory=" ..profile, url})
  t:start()
end

-- Shortcut to open Chrome
hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "shift", "ctrl"}, "T", function()
  ChromeWithProfile()
end)

You can simply change the URL to include the profile and meeting ID.

In Hammerspoon, how to open an app and pass in startup params

2 Answers2