Please use the Angular CLI if you want an angular app

Angular Webpack Starter

An Angular starter kit featuring Angular 6, Ahead of Time Compile, Router, Forms, Http, Services, Tests, E2E), Karma, Protractor, Jasmine, Istanbul, TypeScript, @types, TsLint, Codelyzer, Hot Module Replacement, and Webpack.

If you're looking for Angular 1.x please use NG6-starter If you're looking to learn about Webpack and ES6 Build Tools check out ES6-build-tools If you're looking to learn TypeScript see TypeStrong/learn-typescript If you're looking for something easier to get started with then see the angular-seed that I also maintain gdi2290/angular-seed

This seed repo serves as an Angular starter for anyone looking to get up and running with Angular and TypeScript fast. Using a Webpack 4 for building our files and assisting with boilerplate. We're also using Protractor for our end-to-end story and Karma for our unit tests.

Best practices in file and application organization for Angular.
Ready to go build system using Webpack for working with TypeScript.
Angular examples that are ready to go when experimenting with Angular.
A great Angular seed repo for anyone who wants to start their project.
Ahead of Time (AoT) compile for rapid page loads of your production builds.
Tree shaking to automatically remove unused code from your production bundle.
Testing Angular code with Jasmine and Karma.
Coverage with Istanbul and Karma
End-to-end Angular app testing using Protractor.
Type manager with @types
Hot Module Replacement with Webpack and @gdi2290/hmr and @gdi2290/hmr-loader

Quick start

Make sure you have Node version >= 8.0 and (NPM >= 5 or Yarn )

Clone/Download the repo then edit app.component.ts inside /src/app/app.component.ts

# clone our repo
# --depth 1 removes all but one .git commit history
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/gdi2290/angular-starter.git

# change directory to our repo
cd angular-starter

# install the repo with npm
npm install

# start the server
npm start

# use Hot Module Replacement
npm run server:dev:hmr

# if you're in China use cnpm
# https://github.com/cnpm/cnpm

go to http://0.0.0.0:3000 or http://localhost:3000 in your browser

File Structure
Getting Started
Configuration
AoT Don'ts
External Stylesheets
Contributing
TypeScript
@Types
Frequently asked questions
Support, Questions, or Feedback
Deployment
License

File Structure

We use the component approach in our starter. This is the new standard for developing Angular apps and a great way to ensure maintainable code by encapsulation of our behavior logic. A component is basically a self contained app usually in a single file or a folder with each concern as a file: style, template, specs, e2e, and component class. Here's how it looks:

angular-starter/
 ├──config/                        * our configuration
 |   ├──build-utils.js             * common config and shared functions for prod and dev
 |   ├──config.common.json         * config for both environments prod and dev such title and description of index.html
 |   ├──config.dev.json            * config for development environment
 |   ├──config.prod.json           * config for production environment 
 │   │                              (note: you can load your own config file, just set the evn ANGULAR_CONF_FILE with the path of your own file)
 |   ├──helpers.js                 * helper functions for our configuration files
 |   ├──spec-bundle.js             * ignore this magic that sets up our Angular testing environment
 |   ├──karma.conf.js              * karma config for our unit tests
 |   ├──protractor.conf.js         * protractor config for our end-to-end tests
 │   ├──webpack.common.js          * common tasks for webpack build process shared for dev and prod
 │   ├──webpack.dev.js             * our development webpack config
 │   ├──webpack.prod.js            * our production webpack config
 │   └──webpack.test.js            * our testing webpack config
 │
 ├──src/                           * our source files that will be compiled to javascript
 |   ├──main.browser.ts            * our entry file for our browser environment
 │   │
 |   ├──index.html                 * Index.html: where we generate our index page
 │   │
 |   ├──polyfills.ts               * our polyfills file
 │   │
 │   ├──app/                       * WebApp: folder
 │   │   ├──app.component.spec.ts  * a simple test of components in app.component.ts
 │   │   ├──app.e2e.ts             * a simple end-to-end test for /
 │   │   └──app.component.ts       * a simple version of our App component components
 │   │
 │   └──assets/                    * static assets are served here
 │       ├──icon/                  * our list of icons from www.favicon-generator.org
 │       ├──service-worker.js      * ignore this. Web App service worker that's not complete yet
 │       ├──robots.txt             * for search engines to crawl your website
 │       └──humans.txt             * for humans to know who the developers are
 │
 │
 ├──tslint.json                    * typescript lint config
 ├──typedoc.json                   * typescript documentation generator
 ├──tsconfig.json                  * typescript config used outside webpack
 ├──tsconfig.webpack.json          * config that webpack uses for typescript
 ├──package.json                   * what npm uses to manage its dependencies
 └──webpack.config.js              * webpack main configuration file

Getting Started

Dependencies

What you need to run this app:

node and npm (brew install node)
Ensure you're running the latest versions Node v8.x.x+ (or v9.x.x) and NPM 5.x.x+

If you have nvm installed, which is highly recommended (brew install nvm) you can do a nvm install --lts && nvm use in $ to run with the latest Node LTS. You can also have this zsh done for you automatically

Once you have those, you should install these globals with npm install --global:

webpack (npm install --global webpack)
webpack-dev-server (npm install --global webpack-dev-server)
karma (npm install --global karma-cli)
protractor (npm install --global protractor)
typescript (npm install --global typescript)
tslint (npm install --global tslint@4.5.1)

Installing

fork this repo
clone your fork
npm install webpack-dev-server rimraf webpack -g to install required global dependencies
npm install to install all dependencies or yarn
npm run server to start the dev server in another tab

Running the app

After you have installed all dependencies you can now run the app. Run npm run server to start a local server using webpack-dev-server which will watch, build (in-memory), and reload for you. The port will be displayed to you as http://0.0.0.0:3000 (or if you prefer IPv6, if you're using express server, then it's http://[::1]:3000/).

server

# development
npm run server
# production
npm run build:prod
npm run server:prod

Other commands

the following commands with npm can be used with yarn as well

build files

# development
npm run build:dev
# production (jit)
npm run build:prod
# AoT
npm run build:aot

hot module replacement

npm run server:dev:hmr

watch and build files

npm run watch

run unit tests

npm run test

watch and run our tests

npm run watch:test

run end-to-end tests

# update Webdriver (optional, done automatically by postinstall script)
npm run webdriver:update
# this will start a test server and launch Protractor
npm run e2e

continuous integration (run unit tests and e2e tests together)

# this will test both your JIT and AoT builds
npm run ci

run Protractor's elementExplorer (for end-to-end)

npm run e2e:live

build Docker

npm run build:docker

Configuration

Configuration files live in config/ we are currently using webpack, karma, and protractor for different stages of your application

AoT Don'ts

The following are some things that will make AoT compile fail.

Don’t use require statements for your templates or styles, use styleUrls and templateUrls, the angular2-template-loader plugin will change it to require at build time.
Don’t use default exports.
Don’t use form.controls.controlName, use form.get(‘controlName’)
Don’t use control.errors?.someError, use control.hasError(‘someError’)
Don’t use functions in your providers, routes or declarations, export a function and then reference that function name
@Inputs, @Outputs, View or Content Child(ren), Hostbindings, and any field you use from the template or annotate for Angular should be public

For more detailed guide on AoT's Do's and Don'ts refer to https://github.com/rangle/angular-2-aot-sandbox

External Stylesheets

Any stylesheets (Sass or CSS) placed in the src/styles directory and imported into your project will automatically be compiled into an external .css and embedded in your production builds.

For example to use Bootstrap as an external stylesheet:

Create a styles.scss file (name doesn't matter) in the src/styles directory.
npm install the version of Bootstrap you want.
In styles.scss add @import '~bootstrap/scss/bootstrap.scss';
In src/app/app.module.ts add underneath the other import statements: import '../styles/styles.scss';

Contributing

You can include more examples as components but they must introduce a new concept such as Home component (separate folders), and Todo (services). I'll accept pretty much everything so feel free to open a Pull-Request

TypeScript

To take full advantage of TypeScript with autocomplete you would have to install it globally and use an editor with the correct TypeScript plugins.

Use latest TypeScript compiler

TypeScript 2.7.x includes everything you need. Make sure to upgrade, even if you installed TypeScript previously.

npm install --global typescript

Use a TypeScript-aware editor

We have good experience using these editors:

Visual Studio Code
Webstorm 2018.1
Atom with TypeScript plugin
Sublime Text with Typescript-Sublime-Plugin

Visual Studio Code + Debugger for Chrome

Install Debugger for Chrome and see docs for instructions to launch Chrome

The included .vscode automatically connects to the webpack development server on port 3000.

Types

When you include a module that doesn't include Type Definitions inside of the module you can include external Type Definitions with @types

i.e, to have youtube api support, run this command in terminal:

npm i @types/youtube @types/gapi @types/gapi.youtube

In some cases where your code editor doesn't support Typescript 2 yet or these types weren't listed in tsconfig.json, add these to "src/custom-typings.d.ts" to make peace with the compile check:

import '@types/gapi.youtube';
import '@types/gapi';
import '@types/youtube';

Custom Type Definitions

When including 3rd party modules you also need to include the type definition for the module if they don't provide one within the module. You can try to install it with @types

npm install @types/node
npm install @types/lodash

If you can't find the type definition in the registry we can make an ambient definition in this file for now. For example

declare module "my-module" {
  export function doesSomething(value: string): string;
}

If you're prototyping and you will fix the types later you can also declare it as type any

declare var assert: any;
declare var _: any;
declare var $: any;

If you're importing a module that uses Node.js modules which are CommonJS you need to import as

import * as _ from 'lodash';

Frequently asked questions

What's the current browser support for Angular?
- Please view the updated list of browser support for Angular
Why is my service, aka provider, is not injecting parameter correctly?
- Please use @Injectable() for your service for typescript to correctly attach the metadata (this is a TypeScript problem)
Where do I write my tests?
- You can write your tests next to your component files. See /src/app/home/home.component.spec.ts
How do I start the app when I get EACCES and EADDRINUSE errors?
- The EADDRINUSE error means the port 3000 is currently being used and EACCES is lack of permission for webpack to build files to ./dist/
How to use sass for