For advanced customization of the lightning server first clone the lightning repository and install the server

$ git clone git@github.com:lightning-viz/lightning.git
$ cd lightning
$ npm install

and start it with:

$ npm start

This will start the server at http://localhost:3000.

Using Postgres

The default SQLite database should be suitable for development purposes, but in production you may want to use Postgres. To start using Postgres with lightning, do the following:

• Set the environmental variable NODE_ENV=production and lightning will look for a postgres database to connect to. Alternatively change your database config from sqlite to postgres.
• Make sure postgres is installed and a server is running. On OSX we recommend using Postgres.app.

Then run the following to initialize the database:

$ npm run createdb
$ npm run migrate

Start the lightning server as described above. Lightning will now be running using Postgres.