Run a single-node, on-disk server

For the purposes of getting started with SurrealDB quickly, we will start a RocksDB database which persists data on the filesystem. This configuration is great for trying out the database and small deployments.

surreal start rocksdb:mydatabase.db

The default logging level for the database server is info, resulting in any informational logs to be output to the standard output. To control the logging verbosity, specify the --log argument. The following command starts the database with trace level logging, resulting in most logs being output to the terminal.

surreal start --log trace rocksdb:mydatabase.db

In versions of SurrealDB before 2.0.0, anyone would be able to connect to this server to begin running queries. However, SurrealDB since version 2.0.0 runs with authentication by default. In order to disable it, the --unauthenticated flag can be passed in.

surreal start --log trace --unauthenticated rocksdb:mydatabase.db

However, for anything but simple testing, it is better to configure your initial root-level user by setting the --user and --pass command-line arguments. The following command starts the database with a top-level user named root with a password also set to root. The root user will be persisted in storage, which means you don’t have to include the command line arguments next time you start SurrealDB.

surreal start --log trace --user root --pass root rocksdb:mydatabase.db

In order to change the default port that SurrealDB uses for web connections and from database clients you can use the --bind argument. The following command starts the database on port 8080.

surreal start --log trace --user root --pass root --bind 0.0.0.0:8080 rocksdb://path/to/mydatabase

After running the above command, you should see the SurrealDB server startup successfully.

surreal start --user root --pass root --bind 0.0.0.0:8080 rocksdb:mydatabase.db
2023-08-30T15:06:34.788739Z  INFO surreal::dbs: ✅🔒 Authentication is enabled 🔒✅
2023-08-30T15:06:34.788821Z  INFO surrealdb::kvs::ds: Starting kvs store in file:mydatabase.db
2023-08-30T15:06:34.788859Z  INFO surrealdb::kvs::ds: Started kvs store in file:mydatabase.db
2023-08-30T15:06:34.789222Z  INFO surrealdb::kvs::ds: Initial credentials were provided and no existing root-level users were found: create the initial user 'root'.
2023-08-30T15:06:35.205123Z  INFO surrealdb::node: Started node agent
2023-08-30T15:06:35.205827Z  INFO surrealdb::net: Started web server on 0.0.0.0:8080

For details on the different commands available, visit the CLI tool documentation.