To get familiar with Barely SMS, let's start it up in your terminal the same way you've been doing all along in this book so far. Once you change into the building-a-messaging-app directory in the source code bundle that comes with this book, you can start the development server just like any other create-react-app project:

npm start

In another Terminal window or tab, you can start the API server for Barely SMS by running the following command from within the same directory:

npm run api

This will start a basic Express (http://expressjs.com/) app. Once the server is up and listening for requests, you should see the following output:

API server listening on port 3001!  

Now you're ready to login.