How to bundle an Angular app for production

What is the best method to bundle Angular (version 2, 4, 6, ...) for production on a live web server.

Please include the Angular version within answers so we can track better when it moves to later releases.

2 to 13 (TypeScript) with Angular CLI

OneTime Setup

• npm install -g @angular/cli
• ng new projectFolder creates a new application

Bundling Step

• ng build (run in command line when directory is projectFolder).

  flag prod bundle for production is now the default (see the Angular documentation to customize it if needed).

• Compress using Brotli compression the resources using the following command

  for i in dist/*/*; do brotli $i; done

bundles are generated by default to projectFolder/dist(/$projectFolder for v6+)**

Output

Sizes with Angular 13.2.4 with CLI 13.2.4and option CSS without Angular routing

• dist/main-[es-version].[hash].js Your application bundled [ ES5 size: 132 KB for new Angular CLI application empty, 39 KB compressed].
• dist/polyfill-[es-version].[hash].bundle.js the polyfill dependencies (@angular, RxJS...) bundled [ ES5 size: 37 KB for new Angular CLI application empty, 12 KB compressed].
• dist/index.html entry point of your application.
• dist/runtime-[es-version].[hash].bundle.js webpack loader
• dist/style.[hash].bundle.css the style definitions
• dist/assets resources copied from the Angular CLI assets configuration

Deployment

You can get a preview of your application using the ng serve --prod command that starts a local HTTP server such that the application with production files is accessible using http://localhost:4200. This is not safe to use for production usage.

For a production usage, you have to deploy all the files from the dist folder in the HTTP server of your choice.

2.0.1 Final using Gulp (TypeScript - Target: ES5)

---

OneTime Setup

• npm install (run in cmd when direcory is projectFolder)

Bundling Steps

• npm run bundle (run in cmd when direcory is projectFolder)

bundles are generated to projectFolder / bundles /

Output

• bundles/dependencies.bundle.js [ size: ~ 1 MB (as small as possible) ]
  • contains rxjs and angular dependencies, not the whole frameworks
• bundles/app.bundle.js [ size: depends on your project, mine is ~ 0.5 MB ]
  • contains your project

File Structure

• projectFolder / app / (all components, directives, templates, etc)
• projectFolder / gulpfile.js

var gulp = require('gulp'),
  tsc = require('gulp-typescript'),
  Builder = require('systemjs-builder'),
  inlineNg2Template = require('gulp-inline-ng2-template');

gulp.task('bundle', ['bundle-app', 'bundle-dependencies'], function(){});

gulp.task('inline-templates', function () {
  return gulp.src('app/**/*.ts')
    .pipe(inlineNg2Template({ useRelativePaths: true, indent: 0, removeLineBreaks: true}))
    .pipe(tsc({
      "target": "ES5",
      "module": "system",
      "moduleResolution": "node",
      "sourceMap": true,
      "emitDecoratorMetadata": true,
      "experimentalDecorators": true,
      "removeComments": true,
      "noImplicitAny": false
    }))
    .pipe(gulp.dest('dist/app'));
});

gulp.task('bundle-app', ['inline-templates'], function() {
  // optional constructor options
  // sets the baseURL and loads the configuration file
  var builder = new Builder('', 'dist-systemjs.config.js');

  return builder
    .bundle('dist/app/**/* - [@angular/**/*.js] - [rxjs/**/*.js]', 'bundles/app.bundle.js', { minify: true})
    .then(function() {
      console.log('Build complete');
    })
    .catch(function(err) {
      console.log('Build error');
      console.log(err);
    });
});

gulp.task('bundle-dependencies', ['inline-templates'], function() {
  // optional constructor options
  // sets the baseURL and loads the configuration file
  var builder = new Builder('', 'dist-systemjs.config.js');

  return builder
    .bundle('dist/app/**/*.js - [dist/app/**/*.js]', 'bundles/dependencies.bundle.js', { minify: true})
    .then(function() {
      console.log('Build complete');
    })
    .catch(function(err) {
      console.log('Build error');
      console.log(err);
    });
});

• projectFolder / package.json (same as Quickstart guide, just shown devDependencies and npm-scripts required to bundle)

{
  "name": "angular2-quickstart",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "scripts": {
    ***
     "gulp": "gulp",
     "rimraf": "rimraf",
     "bundle": "gulp bundle",
     "postbundle": "rimraf dist"
  },
  "license": "ISC",
  "dependencies": {
    ***
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "rimraf": "^2.5.2",
    "gulp": "^3.9.1",
    "gulp-typescript": "2.13.6",
    "gulp-inline-ng2-template": "2.0.1",
    "systemjs-builder": "^0.15.16"
  }
}

• projectFolder / systemjs.config.js (same as Quickstart guide, not available there anymore)

(function(global) {

  // map tells the System loader where to look for things
  var map = {
    'app':                        'app',
    'rxjs':                       'node_modules/rxjs',
    'angular2-in-memory-web-api': 'node_modules/angular2-in-memory-web-api',
    '@angular':                   'node_modules/@angular'
  };

  // packages tells the System loader how to load when no filename and/or no extension
  var packages = {
    'app':                        { main: 'app/boot.js',  defaultExtension: 'js' },
    'rxjs':                       { defaultExtension: 'js' },
    'angular2-in-memory-web-api': { defaultExtension: 'js' }
  };

  var packageNames = [    '@angular/common',    '@angular/compiler',    '@angular/core',    '@angular/forms',    '@angular/http',    '@angular/platform-browser',    '@angular/platform-browser-dynamic',    '@angular/router',    '@angular/router-deprecated',    '@angular/testing',    '@angular/upgrade',  ];

  // add package entries for angular packages in the form '@angular/common': { main: 'index.js', defaultExtension: 'js' }
  packageNames.forEach(function(pkgName) {
    packages[pkgName] = { main: 'index.js', defaultExtension: 'js' };
  });

  var config = {
    map: map,
    packages: packages
  };

  // filterSystemConfig - index.asp's chance to modify config before we register it.
  if (global.filterSystemConfig) { global.filterSystemConfig(config); }

  System.config(config);

})(this);

• projetcFolder / dist-systemjs.config.js (just shown the difference with systemjs.config.json)

var map = {
    'app':                        'dist/app',
  };

• projectFolder / index.html (production) - The order of the script tags is critical. Placing the dist-systemjs.config.js tag after the bundle tags would still allow the program to run but the dependency bundle would be ignored and dependencies would be loaded from the node_modules folder.

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8"/>
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"/>
  <base href="/"/>
  <title>Angular</title>
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css"/>
</head>
<body>

<my-app>
  loading...
</my-app>

<!-- Polyfill(s) for older browsers -->
<script src="node_modules/core-js/client/shim.min.js"></script>

<script src="node_modules/zone.js/dist/zone.min.js"></script>
<script src="node_modules/reflect-metadata/Reflect.js"></script>
<script src="node_modules/systemjs/dist/system.js"></script>

<script src="dist-systemjs.config.js"></script>
<!-- Project Bundles. Note that these have to be loaded AFTER the systemjs.config script -->
<script src="bundles/dependencies.bundle.js"></script>
<script src="bundles/app.bundle.js"></script>

<script>
    System.import('app/boot').catch(function (err) {
      console.error(err);
    });
</script>
</body>
</html>

• projectFolder / app / boot.ts is where the bootstrap is.

---

The best I could do yet :)

Angular 2 with Webpack (without CLI setup)

1- The tutorial by the Angular2 team

The Angular2 team published a tutorial for using Webpack

I created and placed the files from the tutorial in a small GitHub seed project. So you can quickly try the workflow.

Instructions:

• npm install

• npm start. For development. This will create a virtual "dist" folder that will be livereloaded at your localhost address.

• npm run build. For production. "This will create a physical "dist" folder version than can be sent to a webserver. The dist folder is 7.8MB but only 234KB is actually required to load the page in a web browser.
  
  

  2 - A Webkit starter kit

This Webpack Starter Kit offers some more testing features than the above tutorial and seem quite popular.

Angular 2 production workflow with SystemJs builder and gulp

Angular.io have quick start tutorial. I copied this tutorial and extended with some simple gulp tasks for bundling everything to dist folder which can be copied to server and work just like that. I tried to optimize everything to work well on Jenkis CI, so node_modules can be cached and don't need to be copied.

Source code with sample app on Github: https://github.com/Anjmao/angular2-production-workflow

Steps to production

1. Clean typescripts compiled js files and dist folder
2. Compile typescript files inside app folder
3. Use SystemJs bundler to bundle everything to dist folder with generated hashes for browser cache refresh
4. Use gulp-html-replace to replace index.html scripts with bundled versions and copy to dist folder
5. Copy everything inside assets folder to dist folder

Node: While you always can create your own build process, but I highly recommend to use angular-cli, because it have all needed workflows and it works perfectly now. We are already using it in production and don't have any issues with angular-cli at all.

Angular CLI 1.x.x (Works with Angular 4.x.x, 5.x.x)

This supports:

• Angular 2.x and 4.x
• Latest Webpack 2.x
• Angular AoT compiler
• Routing (normal and lazy)
• SCSS
• Custom file bundling (assets)
• Additional development tools (linter, unit & end-to-end test setups)

Initial Setup

ng new project-name --routing

You can add --style=scss for SASS .scss support.

You can add --ng4 for using Angular 4 instead of Angular 2.

After creating the project, the CLI will automatically run npm install for you. If you want to use Yarn instead, or just want to look at the project skeleton without install, check how to do it here.

Bundle Steps

Inside the project folder:

ng build -prod

At the current version you need to to specify --aot manually, because it can be used in development mode (although that's not practical due to slowness).

This also performs AoT compilation for even smaller bundles (no Angular compiler, instead, generated compiler output). The bundles are much smaller with AoT if you use Angular 4 as the generated code is smaller.
You can test your app with AoT in development mode (sourcemaps, no minification) and AoT by running ng build --aot.

Output

The default output dir is ./dist, although it can be changed in ./angular-cli.json.

Deployable Files

The result of build step is the following:

(Note: <content-hash> refers to hash / fingerprint of the contents of the file that's meant to be a cache busting way, this is possible since Webpack writes the script tags by itself)

• ./dist/assets
  Files copied as-is from ./src/assets/**
• ./dist/index.html
  From ./src/index.html, after adding webpack scripts to it
  Source template file is configurable in ./angular-cli.json
• ./dist/inline.js
  Small webpack loader / polyfill
• ./dist/main.<content-hash>.bundle.js
  The main .js file containing all the .js scripts generated / imported
• ./dist/styles.<content-hash>.bundle.js
  When you use Webpack loaders for CSS, which is the CLI way, they are loaded via JS here

In older versions it also created gzipped versions for checking their size, and .map sourcemaps files, but this is no longer happening as people kept asking to remove these.

Other Files

In certain other occasions, you might find other unwanted files/folders:

• ./out-tsc/
  From ./src/tsconfig.json's outDir
• ./out-tsc-e2e/
  From ./e2e/tsconfig.json's outDir
• ./dist/ngfactory/
  From AoT compiler (not configurable without forking the CLI as of beta 16)

As of today I still find the Ahead-of-Time Compilation cookbook as the best recipe for production bundling. You can find it here: https://angular.io/docs/ts/latest/cookbook/aot-compiler.html

My experience with Angular 2 so far is that AoT creates the smallest builds with almost no loading time. And most important as the question here is about - you only need to ship a few files to production.

This seems to be because the Angular compiler will not be shipped with the production builds as the templates are compiled "Ahead of Time". It's also very cool to see your HTML template markup transformed to javascript instructions that would be very hard to reverse engineer into the original HTML.

I've made a simple video where I demonstrate download size, number of files etc. for an Angular 2 app in dev vs AoT build - which you can see here:

https://youtu.be/ZoZDCgQwnmQ

You'll find the source code used in the video here:

https://github.com/fintechneo/angular2-templates

        **Production build with
        
         - Angular Rc5
         - Gulp
         - typescripts 
         - systemjs**
        
        1)con-cat all js files  and css files include on index.html using  "gulp-concat".
          - styles.css (all css concat in this files)
          - shims.js(all js concat in this files)
        
        2)copy all images and fonts as well as html files  with gulp task to "/dist".
        
        3)Bundling -minify angular libraries and app components mentioned in systemjs.config.js file.
         Using gulp  'systemjs-builder'
        
            SystemBuilder = require('systemjs-builder'),
            gulp.task('system-build', ['tsc'], function () {
                var builder = new SystemBuilder();
                return builder.loadConfig('systemjs.config.js')
                    .then(function () {
                        builder.buildStatic('assets', 'dist/app/app_libs_bundle.js')
                    })
                    .then(function () {
                        del('temp')
                    })
            });
    
    
    4)Minify bundles  using 'gulp-uglify'

jsMinify = require('gulp-uglify'),

    gulp.task('minify', function () {
        var options = {
            mangle: false
        };
        var js = gulp.src('dist/app/shims.js')
            .pipe(jsMinify())
            .pipe(gulp.dest('dist/app/'));
        var js1 = gulp.src('dist/app/app_libs_bundle.js')
            .pipe(jsMinify(options))
            .pipe(gulp.dest('dist/app/'));
        var css = gulp.src('dist/css/styles.min.css');
        return merge(js,js1, css);
    });

5) In index.html for production 
    
    <html>
    <head>
        <title>Hello</title>
    
        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
        <meta charset="utf-8" />
     
       <link rel="stylesheet" href="app/css/styles.min.css" />   
       <script type="text/javascript" src="app/shims.js"></script>  
       <base href="/">
    </head>
     <body>
    <my-app>Loading...</my-app>
     <script type="text/javascript" src="app/app_libs_bundle.js"></script> 
    </body>
    
    </html>

 6) Now just copy your dist folder to '/www' in wamp server node need to copy node_modules in www.

You can deploy your angular application on github using angular-cli-ghpages

check out the link to find how to deploy using this cli.

the deployed website will be stored in some branch in github typically

gh-pages

use can clone the git branch and use it like static website in your server

"Best" depends on the scenario. There are times when you only care about the smallest possible single bundle, but in large apps you may have to consider lazy loading. At some point it becomes impractical to serve the entire app as a single bundle.

In the latter case Webpack is generally the best way since it supports code splitting.

For a single bundle I would consider Rollup, or the Closure compiler if you are feeling brave :-)

I have created samples of all Angular bundlers I've ever used here: http://www.syntaxsuccess.com/viewarticle/angular-production-builds

The code can be found here: https://github.com/thelgevold/angular-2-samples

Angular version: 4.1.x

ng serve works for serving our application for development purposes. What about for production? If we look into our package.json file, we can see that there are scripts we can use:

"scripts": {
  "ng": "ng",
  "start": "ng serve",
  "build": "ng build --prod",
  "test": "ng test",
  "lint": "ng lint",
  "e2e": "ng e2e"
},

The build script uses the Angular CLI's ng build with the --prod flag. Let's try that now. We can do it one of two ways:

# using the npm scripts

npm run build

# using the cli directly

ng build --prod

This time we are given four files instead of the five. The --prod flag tells Angular to make our application much smaller in size.

Just setup angular 4 with webpack 3 within a minute your development and production ENV bundle will become ready without any issue just follow the below github doc

https://github.com/roshan3133/angular2-webpack-starter

Please try below CLI command in current project directory. It will create dist folder bundle. so you can upload all files within dist folder for deployments.

ng build --prod --aot --base-href.