README.md

Playground for SSR and Prerendering with Angular

Installing and building

Install all dependencies as usual. Just to make sure everything is fine, run the project locally:

npm install
ng serve

If you want, you can take a look at the HTML source code in the browser. It should show the typical index.html skeleton with an almost empty <app-root></app-root> element.

We then need separate builds for client and server.

# Client
ng build --prod

# Server
ng run ssr-playground:server:production


# OR both together
npm run build:ssr

You should now find a dist folder with two sub-directories:

- dist
  - ssr-playground
    - browser
    - server

We can take a look at the server now!

Compiling the server for SSR

The server part is a TypeScript program for Node.js in the server.ts file. It is already bundled with the application in dist/ssr-playground/server/main.js after running npm run build:ssr.

Running Server-side rendering

Run the Express server with live server-side rendering:

node dist/ssr-playground/server/main
# OR
npm run serve:ssr

Open your browser at http://localhost:4000 to see it in action. When you show the source code in the browser you should see the server-side rendered HTML.

Pre-rendering

npm run prerender

You should now find some subfolders in the dist/browser directory, according to the routes of the application. Run a local web server there, e.g. angular-http-server or http-server:

cd dist/ssr-playground/browser
npx http-server

Open your browser at http://localhost:8080. This should be blazing fast because it just shows the prerendered pages without doing any rendering at runtime. The Angular application bundles will kick in later and take over the static page.