Starting the application

Now, let's start the application and see the output. There are multiple ways to run the application:

• By using the Spring Boot Gradle task from the terminal/command line
• By executing the main Java class src/main/java/com/mycompany/store/StoreApp.java from an IDE 
• By executing the packaged application file using the java -jar command

Let's start the application using the Gradle task. If you want to run the application directly in the IDE, just open the main app file StoreApp.java mentioned earlier, right-click, and choose Run 'StoreApp'.

To start the application via Gradle, open a terminal/command line and navigate to the application folder. Then, execute the Gradle command as follows (if you are on windows, execute gradlew.bat). This will trigger the default task bootRun:

> cd online-store
> ./gradlew

Running ./gradlew is equivalent to running ./gradlew bootRun -Pdev. For the client side, the webpack build needs to be run before starting the server for the first time, otherwise you will see a blank page. This task is run automatically during the app generation, but if it fails for some reason, it can be triggered manually by running yarn run webpack:build. The task can be triggered directly by the Gradle command as well by running ./gradlew webpackBuildDev bootRun -Pdev.

Gradle will start downloading the wrapper and dependencies, and you should see the console output similar to the following screenshot after some time (anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes depending on network speed):

The app has started successfully and is available on http://localhost:8080. Open your favorite browser and navigate to the URL.

Note that the build preceding will stay at 90% as the process is running continuously.