There are two ways to start up the Phoenix server, and now that the application is set up and the database is there to support our application, we can move on to actually running it! The two different ways to run your application are either via Mix phx.server or in the IEx console. In the context of your application requiring debugging support via IEx, you need -S Mix phx.server. As a general rule, I only run my application in a local development environment through IEx. This allows you to get interactive debugging via IEx.pry, as well as the ability to perform things like Ecto queries or test calling public functions in modules.

Remember when we talked about the interactive help functions that are built-in to Elixir and can be accessed via IEx? Well, you can do the same thing with Phoenix functions, too! For example, let's say we want to know a little more information about how we send out JSON content directly from a controller, as shown in the following example:

iex(4)> h Phoenix.Controller.json

  def json(conn, data)

Sends JSON response.

It uses the configured :format_encoders under the :phoenix application for
:json to pick up the encoder module.

## Examples

   iex> json conn, %{id: 123}

Okay, so we now have our application and we have things up and running. If we visit our browser window, we should see the Phoenix startup page, as follows: