Run a single-node, in-memory server

For the purposes of getting started with SurrealDB quickly, we will start an in-memory database which does not persist data on shutdown. This database is great for development and testing.

surreal start memory

SurrealDB will assume memory in case this argument is not passed in, so the following command is identical to the above.

surreal start

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 debug level logging, resulting in more logs being output to the terminal. If extra verbosity is not needed, specify a lower level or simply remove the flag, which will default to the info level.

surreal start --log debug memory

In versions of SurrealDB before 2.0, anyone would be able to connect to this server to begin running queries. However, SurrealDB since version 2.0 runs with authentication by default. In order to disable it, the --unauthenticated flag can be passed in.

surreal start --unauthenticated memory

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.

surreal start --user root --pass root memory

The previous command will bootstrap the server with the provided initial credentials, you can now remove those args and rely on DEFINE USER to change the password or create more users.

surreal start --user username --pass 123456 memory

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 --user root --pass root --bind 0.0.0.0:8080 memory

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 memory
2023-08-30T15:06:34.788821Z  INFO surrealdb::kvs::ds: Starting kvs store in memory
2023-08-30T15:06:34.788859Z  INFO surrealdb::kvs::ds: Started kvs store in memory
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.