Provide a way to launch the browser when running `dotnet run`

It would be great if there was a way to run an ASP.NET Core app from the command line using dotnet run and have the default browser launch at the right URL. CLIs for other platforms let you do this. For example, with the Angular CLI you can do ng serve --open to both run the app and open the default browser.

This would be particularly useful for projects that you created using VS, which generate random ports for the server URLs.

There are already launchBrowser and launchUrl properties the launch profiles in launchSettings.json that let you specify that you want this behavior in VS.

We would also want this to work with dotnet watch without having the browser pop up multiple times, which may require some coordination.

@mlorbetske @natemcmaster @livarcocc @KathleenDollard

[maxild]

I have to support https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/9038#issuecomment-656351718

Working with Blazor WASM on Linux (where firefox often is the default browser for good reasons: xdg-open will use firefox`) is not easy out of the box, when Chrome is the only supported dev browser (on Linux).

My current solution is to use 2 terminals

Terminal 1

$ dotnet run --no-launch-profile 

Terminal 2

$ google-chrome http://localhost:5000

One strange thing is that I can’t seem to get this to work with dotnet watch. That is

Terminal 1

$ dotnet watch run --no-launch-profile 

does use the default launchSettings.json (launchBrowser, inspectUri, applicationUrl etc) config values for the app, I have no idea why the child dotnet run is not getting the --no-launch-profile switch??? May be my mistake???

REQUEST:

Add new browsers field with possible values firefox, chrome, edge etc. to launchSettings.json

"profiles": {
    "BlazorWasmApp": {
      "commandName": "Project",
      "dotnetRunMessages": "true",
      "launchBrowser": true,
      "browsers": ["chrome"], <---- REQEUST: Please add this feature
      "inspectUri": "{wsProtocol}://{url.hostname}:{url.port}/_framework/debug/ws-proxy?browser={browserInspectUri}",
      "applicationUrl": "http://localhost:5000",
      "environmentVariables": {
        "ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT": "Development"
      }
    }
  }

NOTE: Each opened browser should probably also have config values for extra args. I guess this all starts to be a bit platform dependent, but a design should be possible accross windows, macos and the dotnet supported linux distros.

[logcorner]

+1