1. Developing Applications with Oracle Visual Builder
  2. Manage Applications
  3. Optimize Your Builds and Audit Your Code Using Grunt
  4. Grunt Tasks to Build Your Visual Application
  5. vb-serve

vb-serve

Serves static application assets on a local web server started during the Grunt build process (vb-process-local and vb-deploy tasks). The served static assets root is either in the build/processed directory for a processed (non-optimized) application or in the build/optimized directory for an optimized application.

Note:

Application assets produced by vb-process-local are environment agnostic and contain several unresolved environment references, which are resolved when application assets are deployed to a Visual Builder runtime instance by vb-deploy. See Setup to Resolve Environment Variables for details.

The following table describes the subtasks, hooks, and inputs and outputs of the vb-serve task:

Detail Description
subtasks n/a
multitask no
hooks n/a
input build/[processed | optimized]/*
output n/a

The following table describes the task target of the vb-serve task:

Detail Mandatory Description
application_path yes Path to the served web (or mobile) application (for example, webApps/myApp). .

The following table describes the options for the vb-deploy task:

Name Mandatory Default Value Description
application no First web (or mobile) application found Path to the application to be served. Similar to passing the application path via task target, for example, webApps/myApp.
boundPortFile yes n/a Path to the file where vb-serve writes the bound port number. This is useful if you don't specify the port and a free system port is used, but you need an automated system to connect to the served application.
open no false If true, a new browser window will be opened for the served URL.
port no 0 (binds to a free port) Server port
The options can be set either as command-line options or via the Grunt configuration object. Here's an example from the command line:
# First build the application sources
./node_modules/.bin/grunt vb-process-local
# serve the assets at port 8888 and open the application URL in browser
./node_modules/.bin/grunt vb-serve:webApps/myApp --port=8888 --open

The vb-serve task does not finish until you stop it explicitly. You can also stop the task (and the server) by sending a GET request to http://localhost:<port>/stop.