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 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 rocksdb://mydatabase.db
The SurrealDB server runs with authentication enabled by default. To disable it, the --unauthenticated flag can be passed in.
surreal start --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 set to secret. 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 --user root --pass secret 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 --user root --pass secret --bind 0.0.0.0:8080 rocksdb://path/to/mydatabase
After running the above command, you should see the SurrealDB server start up successfully.
surreal start --user root --pass secret --bind 0.0.0.0:8080 rocksdb://mydatabase.db
2025-08-30T15:06:34.788739Z INFO surreal::dbs: ✅🔒 Authentication is enabled 🔒✅
2025-08-30T15:06:34.788821Z INFO surrealdb::kvs::ds: Starting kvs store in file:mydatabase.db
2025-08-30T15:06:34.788859Z INFO surrealdb::kvs::ds: Started kvs store in file:mydatabase.db
2025-08-30T15:06:34.789222Z INFO surrealdb::kvs::ds: Initial credentials were provided and no existing root-level users were found: create the initial user 'root'.
2025-08-30T15:06:35.205123Z INFO surrealdb::node: Started node agent
2025-08-30T15:06:35.205827Z INFO surrealdb::net: Started web server on 0.0.0.0:8080
For details on the different commands available, visit the CLI tool documentation.
Parameters on startup
A number of parameters can be used on startup such as sync to set when to flush the database to the file system. For more details on these parameters, see this page for the start command or this page to set the same parameters using environment variables.
