Angular 4 - The Beginning

When i first started using Angular 2 its in beta. Getting started with Angular is pretty easy. The team provided an awesome cli-tool which will help to create, develop, test and build the Angular project easily. We need to install the angular/cli (Formerly angular-cli) globally. Latest angular/cli(1.1.2 at the time of this writing) will create an Angular 4 project.

npm install -g @angular/cli

Suppose you need to create an Angular 2 project. What will you do? NOrmally what i will do is will install rc4 version of angular cli and create a new project, which will by default create a angular2 project. Then later will update to latest cli and the project will work smoothly in latest cli,

npm install -g @angular/cli@1.0.0-rc.4 

So that's all about angular/cli. You could check out detail in here.

Lets create an application and try it. For creating new application run the following command.

ng new ngApp

This will create a new application and it will install all the dependencies . Do you know what the coolest thing about this cli? You don't have to waste a single minute to setup the development environment. Just think about the application and its structure. forget about the development environment.

Since our application needs routing am going to create a routing file and also the prefix. Prefix is a short name which will be added to every component which we create with cli. Which will make our application components more unique. So am gonna create app like

ng new ngApp --routing --prefix=lm

Here the "lm" means just "logicmania". That's it. Nothing more. You could use anything you wanted.
This is how our application looks.

Lets check the application. You will find number files and folders. At this time we are concerned about whats inside "src/app"  and "src/assets" because this is where our actual application code resides. Outside this application is mostly related to development environment like testing and so on.

Inside the "app" folder you will find a root component has been created. This component does have a html, ts, css and spec file for unit testing. This is where our actual application starts.

If you check the app.component.ts, you can find component definition in the top section. If you check the selector you can find it like "lm-root". "lm" is the prefix added when we created the application. You can view and change this prefix from ".angular-cli.json". Also you could find the html and style sheet files where added in this section. Go to index.html in the "src" folder. You can find the "lm-root" is in the body.

Check the app.module.ts file. You can find BrowserModule which is imported in the module. Note that it will only imported in only one time.

Enough of this code reviews lets run the application .

cd ngApp

ng serve

Go to browser and use http://localhost:4200/#/. Your app is up and running. You could see a page like this one.

You could find the code here.

git clone https://github.com/harilal/ngApp.git
cd ngApp
git checkout -b part1.0
npm install
ng serve