Deployment

When you are ready to deploy your Angular application to a remote server, you have various options.

Automatic deployment with the CLI

The Angular CLI command ng deploy executes the deploy CLI builder associated with your project. A number of third-party builders implement deployment capabilities to different platforms. You can add any of them to your project with ng add.

When you add a package with deployment capability, it will automatically update your workspace configuration (angular.json file) with a deploy section for the selected project. You can then use the ng deploy command to deploy that project.

For example, the following command automatically deploys a project to Firebase.

      
ng add @angular/fireng deploy
    

The command is interactive. In this case, you must have or create a Firebase account and authenticate using it. The command prompts you to select a Firebase project for deployment before building your application and uploading the production assets to Firebase.

The table below lists tools which implement deployment functionality to different platforms. The deploy command for each package may require different command line options. You can read more by following the links associated with the package names below:

If you're deploying to a self-managed server or there's no builder for your favorite cloud platform, you can either create a builder that allows you to use the ng deploy command, or read through this guide to learn how to manually deploy your application.

Manual deployment to a remote server

To manually deploy your application, create a production build and copy the output directory to a web server or content delivery network (CDN). By default, ng build uses the production configuration. If you have customized your build configurations, you may want to confirm production optimizations are being applied before deploying.

ng build outputs the built artifacts to dist/my-app/ by default, however this path can be configured with the outputPath option in the @angular-devkit/build-angular:browser builder. Copy this directory to the server and configure it to serve the directory.

While this is a minimal deployment solution, there are a few requirements for the server to serve your Angular application correctly.

Server configuration

This section covers changes you may need to configure on the server to run your Angular application.

Routed apps must fall back to index.html

Client-side rendered Angular applications are perfect candidates for serving with a static HTML server because all the content is static and generated at build time.

If the application uses the Angular router, you must configure the server to return the application's host page (index.html) when asked for a file that it does not have.

A routed application should support "deep links". A deep link is a URL that specifies a path to a component inside the application. For example, http://my-app.test/users/42 is a deep link to the user detail page that displays the user with id 42.

There is no issue when the user initially loads the index page and then navigates to that URL from within a running client. The Angular router performs the navigation client-side and does not request a new HTML page.

But clicking a deep link in an email, entering it in the browser address bar, or even refreshing the browser while already on the deep linked page will all be handled by the browser itself, outside the running application. The browser makes a direct request to the server for /users/42, bypassing Angular's router.

A static server routinely returns index.html when it receives a request for http://my-app.test/. But most servers by default will reject http://my-app.test/users/42 and returns a 404 - Not Found error unless it is configured to return index.html instead. Configure the fallback route or 404 page to index.html for your server, so Angular is served for deep links and can display the correct route. Some servers call this fallback behavior "Single-Page Application" (SPA) mode.

Once the browser loads the application, Angular router will read the URL to determine which page it is on and display /users/42 correctly.

For "real" 404 pages such as http://my-app.test/does-not-exist, the server does not require any additional configuration. 404 pages implemented in the Angular router will be displayed correctly.

Requesting data from a different server (CORS)

Web developers may encounter a cross-origin resource sharing error when making a network request to a server other than the application's own host server. Browsers forbid such requests unless the server explicitly permits them.

There isn't anything Angular or the client application can do about these errors. The server must be configured to accept the application's requests. Read about how to enable CORS for specific servers at enable-cors.org.

Production optimizations

ng build uses the production configuration unless configured otherwise. This configuration enables the following build optimization features.

See ng build for more about CLI build options and their effects.

Development-only features

When you run an application locally using ng serve, Angular uses the development configuration at runtime which enables:

• Extra safety checks such as expression-changed-after-checked detection.
• More detailed error messages.
• Additional debugging utilities such as the global ng variable with debugging functions and Angular DevTools support.

These features are helpful during development, but they require extra code in the app, which is undesirable in production. To ensure these features do not negatively impact bundle size for end users, Angular CLI removes development-only code from the bundle when building for production.

Building your application with ng build by default uses the production configuration which removes these features from the output for optimal bundle size.

--deploy-url

--deploy-url is a command line option used to specify the base path for resolving relative URLs for assets such as images, scripts, and style sheets at compile time.

      
ng build --deploy-url /my/assets
    

The effect and purpose of --deploy-url overlaps with <base href>. Both can be used for initial scripts, stylesheets, lazy scripts, and css resources.

Unlike <base href> which can be defined in a single place at runtime, the --deploy-url needs to be hard-coded into an application at build time. Prefer <base href> where possible.