Diagnosed start:dev timeout when port 8787 is held by another project and hardened Ready detection for empty wrangler logs. | Dev Logs

Date: 2026-09-06 01:25 Summary: Diagnosed start:dev timeout when port 8787 is held by another project and hardened Ready detection for empty wrangler logs. Visibility: people

[question] @terminals/1.txt — Dev server failed to become ready within timeout (wrangler-dev.log empty); also tried --port 8788.

[try to solve]

Context

npm run start:dev (and a retry with --port 8788) exited after waiting for Ready, pointing at an empty .run/wrangler-dev.log.

Process

1. Confirmed default port 8787 is LISTEN by another repo’s wrangler (seoontest/funnyT, workerd PID holding localhost:8787).
2. Manually ran wrangler on 8788 with the same --local -c .cache/wrangler.no-ai.json args — Ready appeared in ~20s and HTTP / returned 200.
3. Reproduced start:dev --no-build --port 8788 --no-ops-ui successfully; tool-page smoke passed.
4. Hardened waitForDevReady to accept 127.0.0.1 / localhost Ready lines and to treat consecutive HTTP health checks as ready when the log stays empty; improved empty-log error hints in start-dev.mjs.

Root cause / analysis

• 8787 conflict: another project already runs wrangler on the default port; this repo must use --port 8788 (or free 8787).
• Empty log + timeout: the Ready gate previously required a log substring. If the detached child’s stdout never flushed to .run/wrangler-dev.log, the waiter waited the full 90s even when (or after) the process was unhealthy/gone — a brittle coupling to log I/O.

Solution

• Use npm run start:dev -- --port 8788 while 8787 is foreign-owned (server verified up at http://127.0.0.1:8788/).
• ops/lib/dev-process.mjs: Ready needles for both hostnames + HTTP health streak fallback.
• ops/dev/start-dev.mjs: clearer empty-log diagnostics mentioning foreign 8787.

Notes / boundaries

• Do not kill the foreign 8787 process from this repo’s stop:dev (by design).
• Full build:site before start is still slow; --no-build is fine when _pages + local R2 are already seeded.

[actions]

• Updated ops/lib/dev-process.mjs, ops/dev/start-dev.mjs
• Started local dev on port 8788 for verification