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Running Your Application Locally

Goals

  • Let's fire up the application locally

Steps

Step 1

Type this in the terminal:
rails server

This will print some stuff and stay running forever, printing more stuff every time you visit a page in your app.

Step 2

You should see a notification appear in the bottom right corner of your editor.

Click on the Open in Browser button in the notification to navigate to your app.

Screenshot of the 'open in browser' notification.

If you don't see a notification on the bottom right corner of your editor, click the "bell" icon to bring it back up.

Step 3

While the server is running, whatever you type in that terminal tab will be ignored.

To get back to the terminal, you can stop the server by typing Control-c.

Expected result:
^CExiting

Explanation

rails server ran your application locally just like Heroku will be running it on their servers.

This provides a very simple means to see your changes before you commit and push them to Heroku.

Control-c is a way of closing or cancelling terminal programs. Since rails server runs forever, you need to interrupt it with Control-c.

Next Step: