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Webserver

start serves the site with PHP's built-in webserver, at http://localhost:8000 or at the first free port up to 8099 when another process uses 8000. It prints the URL when the server is ready, and stop stops it again:

make start   # Start the webserver
make stop    # Stop it

Set WEBSERVER_HOST to change the hostname, such as 0.0.0.0 to serve on every interface. The server serves build/web through Drupal's own router, and writes its output to .logs/php.log.

How the port is picked​

start takes the port from the first of these that sets it:

  1. WEBSERVER_PORT in your shell - used as it is. Prefix a single command with it, such as WEBSERVER_PORT=9000, for a one-off run.
  2. WEBSERVER_PORT in the project's .env file - used as it is.
  3. Neither - start picks the first free port from 8000 to 8099 and saves it to .env as WEBSERVER_PORT.

Once the port is in .env, stop, provision, drush and login reuse it. make and Ahoy load .env on their own, and git ignores the file. To pick a new port, delete the WEBSERVER_PORT line from .env and run start again.

A saved port wins through a wrapper

make and Ahoy load .env into the environment of every command, so once .env holds a port, a WEBSERVER_PORT prefix on make start or ahoy start has no effect. Edit the line in .env instead, or prefix the tooling command itself, such as WEBSERVER_PORT=9000 vendor/bin/eddy-start.

Sharing a machine with other projects​

start, stop and reset only stop the webserver that serves the project's own build/web. When another process holds the port, such as the server of another project that recorded the same port, stop and reset leave it running, and start fails and names it. Stop that process, or set WEBSERVER_PORT in .env to a free port.

Waiting for the server​

Once it launches the server, start waits up to WEBSERVER_WAIT_TIMEOUT seconds for it to accept connections, then checks that it can serve the site. The timeout is a whole number of 1 or more and defaults to 5. Raise it on a slow machine where start gives up before the server is up:

.env
WEBSERVER_WAIT_TIMEOUT=15

start then starts the public tunnel when you've turned it on, and runs your scripts/start-*.sh lifecycle scripts.