Goals

Let’s fire up the application locally

Steps

Step 1

Make sure that you’re in the test_app folder. You can type pwd (print working directory) in the terminal to see what folder you are in.

Type this in the terminal:

mix phoenix.server

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

Expected result:

Compiled web/views/topic_view.ex
[info] Running TestApp.Endpoint with Cowboy using http on port 4000
11 Sep 17:57:34 - info: compiled 5 files into 2 files, copied 3 in 1.2 sec

Step 2

Point your web browser to http://localhost:4000 See your web app actually running!

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 twice.

Explanation mix phoenix.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 the phoenix server runs forever, you need to interrupt it with Control-c.