Tasks & Services

Tasks and services automate the repetitive work of setting up and operating development environments: seeding databases, starting servers, running tests, authenticating with cloud providers. Define it once and it runs automatically or on-demand. For agents, tasks and services are essential. When Ona can run npm test or docker compose up reliably, it can iterate autonomously without human intervention.

Tasks and Services in environment details

Tasks vs Services

Services are long-running processes that stay active throughout your session:

Databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL)
Backend and frontend servers
Caching systems (Redis)

Tasks are one-off actions that run and complete:

Installing dependencies
Running tests
Seeding databases
Authenticating with cloud providers

A service’s start command must stay running (block) for the service to remain active. If the command exits, the service transitions to Stopped (exit code 0) or Failed (non-zero). For example, npm start or docker run postgres block and keep the service alive, while docker run -d postgres returns immediately and the service stops.

Quick example

# .ona/automations.yaml
services:
  database:
    name: PostgreSQL
    commands:
      start: docker compose up postgres
      ready: docker compose exec postgres pg_isready
    triggeredBy:
      - postDevcontainerStart

tasks:
  seed:
    name: Seed database
    command: npm run db:seed
    dependsOn:
      - database
    triggeredBy:
      - postDevcontainerStart

  test:
    name: Run tests
    command: npm test
    triggeredBy:
      - manual

This configuration:

Starts PostgreSQL when the environment starts
Waits until the database is ready
Seeds the database with test data
Makes “Run tests” available as a manual action

Triggers

Control when tasks and services run:

Trigger	Services	Tasks	When it runs
`manual`	✓	✓	On-demand via the CLI or UI
`postDevcontainerStart`	✓	✓	After the Dev Container starts in a user environment (first start or rebuild). Does not fire during prebuilds.
`postEnvironmentStart`	✓	✓	Every time the environment starts or resumes
`prebuild`	✓	✓	During prebuild execution only (no user secrets available). Does not fire in user environments.
`beforeSnapshot`	✗	✓	Before an environment snapshot is created

See automations.yaml schema for complete trigger documentation, including how triggers interact with prebuilds.

Run automations across repositories

Tasks and services run within individual environments. For cross-repository automation at scale (migrations, security scanning, bulk updates), see Automations.

Next steps

automations.yaml schema - field reference for all fields, commands, triggers, and execution environments
Examples - common patterns for databases, servers, and CI
Dynamic configuration - create tasks and services programmatically

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Startup tasks & services

Tasks vs Services

Quick example

Triggers

Run automations across repositories

Next steps

​Tasks vs Services

​Quick example

​Triggers

​Run automations across repositories

​Next steps

Tasks vs Services

Quick example

Triggers

Run automations across repositories

Next steps