Pencil comes built-in with a dev server which runs on BrowserSync. It supports live reload, and creates a LAN web server which can be accessed by devices connected to the same network.
You can start the development server by running the following command in the root directory of the project:
npm run dev
This will start a server on port 2000 which is set by default. This can be changed using the --port option that comes with this command.
You can access the BrowserSync UI on the default port 3001 or the port specified in the terminal.
The dev command comes with the following options that can be used to change the settings of the development server.
This option changes the default port to the specified port. For example, to change the port to 3000,
npm run dev -- --port 3000
In the package.json file, under the scripts object, you can change the dev command to pencil dev --port 3000 to use this port always automatically.