Lifting Sails

Summary

Now that we've created a Sails project and explored its structure, it's time to start the Sails development server.

1. Starting the Server

   • Navigate to the root of your Sails project (e.g., blog).

   • Run sails lift to start the server.

   • By default, the server runs on port 1337.

2. Checking the Server

   • Open a browser and visit http://localhost:1337 to see the default Sails homepage.

3. Stopping the Server

   • Press Ctrl + C in the terminal to stop the server.

4. Useful Variations of sails lift

   • sails l → A shorter alias for sails lift.

   • sails lift --verbose → Increases log details to see background processes.

   • sails lift --silly → Shows the highest level of logging, including asset pipeline tasks.

   • sails lift --silent → Runs the server without logs, but it will still function.

These options help control logging levels and debugging visibility while running your Sails application.

Transcript

Okay, so now that we've seen how we could make a Sails project, we've also seen what's in a Sails project. The next thing is how to start up the Sails development server. Now to do this, all you have to do is be in the root of the Sails project. In our case, our Sails project is called blog. So all I have to do is call the Sails CLI again, and this time give it the lift command.

So it's sails lift. So when I hit enter, it's going to start up the Sails development server at port 1337. All right. So if I open up Firefox and go to that address, we get to see our default homepage of a brand new scaffolded Sails project.

Okay. So back in the terminal, I could kill the server or you could be able to kill this server by just hitting Ctrl + C. So this will exit from the server.

Now, I want to show you a couple of tips on how you could better use the sails lift command when starting up a Sails server.

• You could also run sails l, which is just an alias for sails lift. This would also start up the Sails server.

• If you want more detailed logs, you can run sails lift --verbose. What this does is increase the log level in Sails, so you can see what Sails is doing in the background.

• You can take this further by running sails lift --silly. This will show even more logs, including how Sails registers hooks and how Grunt watches for changes in the background.

• If you don’t want any logs, you can run sails lift --silent. This will start the server without displaying output, but Sails will still be running.

If I check back in Firefox and refresh the page, we can see that the server is still running even when using the silent flag.

So, in summary:

• To start up the Sails server, you can run sails lift or use the alias sails l.

• There are additional flags like --verbose, --silly, and --silent for controlling logs.