Running locally

The next step after scaffolding out a new project, is to actually start it. To do this you can just deno task start. Environment variables will be automatically read from .env.

$ deno task start
Watcher Process started.
 🍋 Fresh ready
     Local: http://localhost:8000

If you want to start manually without Deno task, deno run the main.ts with the appropriate flags. You will need to provide permission flags for:

• --allow-net: This is required to start the HTTP server.
• --allow-read: This is required to read (static) files from disk.
• --allow-env: This is required to read environment variables that can be used to configure your project.
• --allow-run: This is required to shell out to deno and esbuild under the hood during development to do type stripping. In production this is done using a WebAssembly binary.

For development, you also want to run with the --watch flag, so the Fresh server will automatically reload whenever you make a change to your code. By default --watch only watches over files in your module graph. Some project files like static files are not part of the module graph, but you probably want to restart/reload whenever you make a change to them too. This can be done by passing the extra folder as an argument: --watch=static/. You should also add routes/ to the watch list, so that the server restarts automatically whenever you add a new route.

If you want to change the port or host, modify the config bag of the start() call in main.ts to include an explicit port number:

await start(manifest, { server: { port: 3000 } });

You can also change the port by setting the PORT environment variable:

$ PORT=3000 deno task start

Combining all of this we get the following deno run command:

$ deno run --allow-net --allow-read --allow-env --allow-run --watch=static/,routes/ main.ts
Watcher Process started.
 🍋 Fresh ready
     Local: http://localhost:8000

If you now visit http://localhost:8000, you can see the running project. Try change some of the text in routes/index.tsx and see how the page updates automatically when you save the file.