asp.net core with angular CLI

[wickdninja]

Hello,

Sorry this is not really an issue, but I didn't know where else I could reach out to get some insight on a project I have. I recently was tasked with creating a new asp.net core application, and I wanted to used Angular2 (via the angular cli), but I wasn't able to find any good documentation on how to get the two technologies working together. There is a yoeman generator to scaffold a .Net Core app with angular 2, but it doesn't make use of the CLI and uses a static index.cshtml as the root of the application so the links to the script files must also then be static.

I'm a really big fan of the angular-cli so I set out to create a solution that would allow me to take advantage of it. Here is what I've come up with Angular2AspNetCoreStarter but I didn't know where to go to get feedback, and I wanted to share this in case it can solve someone else's need for the cli in their .net core application.

Again I apologize for opening an issue for this, and if there is a more appropriate channel for these types of things I'd be happy to close the issue and move it there.

Thanks again for such a great tool!

[hansl]

(notifying our developer relationship team) @robwormald @StephenFluin @juleskremer Would this be useful somewhere as a reference?

@Brocco we could have a section on our WIKI for this too.

Closing this as it's not an issue.

[Brocco]

I added this as a nice-to-have on the documentation tracking issue #2711

[wickdninja]

thanks for the quick response

[robwormald]

@wickdninja this is great, cheers. We're all traveling at the moment, but I'll forward this over to the people working on templates and such for Asp and VS with angular 👍

[ChuckkNorris]

@wickdninja Would you mind writing up a brief tutorial about how to get Angular 2 running on an ASP.Net Core web server using the Angular CLI? I'd love to learn how to do this from scratch and I can't seem to get Angular to load (after generating a new project in wwwroot)

[juleskremer]

FYI: we do have some work started on a tutorial which you can see here: angular/angular.io#2850

We are also working on VS templates for ASP.NET but will not look at CLI integration until later in the year.

[wickdninja]

@ChuckkNorris

@Brocco reached out to me via twitter last week, but unfortunately I have not had the free time to start on the tutorial yet. It's on my schedule for this weekend though.

Would it be more useful to document the workflow I followed to create an Angular2 (via CLI)/ .Net Core project, or should I attempt to contribute to angular/angular.io#2850 ?

[ChuckkNorris]

@wickdninja Exactly - Just the steps to get an Angular 2 app running and hosted on ASP.NET Core.

@juleskremer That tutorial looks like it uses razor so it technically wouldn't be an SPA, right? I'd prefer just to have the NG2 app statically hosted on an ASP.NET Core server.

[ctrl-brk]

I started my project this way and then separated the server and the client parts into two different projects. Much more manageable this way and VisualSutido 2015 sucks on editing .ts files.
Actually, the only IDE I know with ability to highlight syntax in internal templates is WebStorm.
Anyway, I run my .net core restful site on one port and separately run Angular app on 4200 using anular cli.
When I make a build for deployment I just tell anular cli to use wwwroot as output folder.
Of course in production you most likely will run both server and client parts on the same port so I prefix all my web service calls with variable from environment.???.ts file. For dev it could be 'http://localhost:60068/api'
and for prod just '/api'

[wickdninja]

@Brocco @ChuckkNorris

Here's my first crack at it.
Repo: https://github.com/wickdninja/DotNetCoreAngular2Demo
ReadMe is the step by step guide. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Copied below as well.

ASP.NET Core / Angular 2 via CLI Quick Start

Disclaimer

This guide was created using the following versions, and provides no guarentee for compatibility with any other versions.

angular-cli: 1.0.0-beta.28.3
node: 7.4.0
os: darwin x64
@angular/common: 2.4.6
@angular/compiler: 2.4.6
@angular/core: 2.4.6
@angular/forms: 2.4.6
@angular/http: 2.4.6
@angular/platform-browser: 2.4.6
@angular/platform-browser-dynamic: 2.4.6
@angular/router: 3.4.6
@angular/compiler-cli: 2.4.6

Install Project Dependencies

• ASP.NET Core
• NodeJS
• Yoeman
  • $ npm i -g yo
• ASP.NET Core Generator
  • $ npm i -g generator-aspnet
• Angular CLI
  • $ npm i -g angular-cli

Generate Project

• $ yo aspnet
  • Select Web Api Project
  • Name application DemoApp
  • $ cd DemoApp

Server Setup

• Open project.json

  • Exclude node_modules from compilation

    • Add the following to "buildOptions"

      "compile": {
        "exclude": [
          "node_modules"
        ]
      }

  • Add StaticFiles dependency

    • Add "Microsoft.AspNetCore.StaticFiles": "1.0.0" to dependencies

• Restore dependencies

  • $ dotnet restore

• Configure server to handle api routes and client side routes

  • Open Startup.cs
    • Locate the Configure method add the following to it

      • Configure CORS

        app.UseCors(cors =>
          cors
          .AllowAnyHeader()
          .AllowAnyMethod()
          .AllowAnyOrigin()
        );

      • Route requests to root for client side spa

        app.Use(async (context, next) =>
        {
            await next();
            if (context.Response.StatusCode == 404)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("passing to client");
                context.Request.Path = "/";
                await next();
            }
        });

      • Enable static files (without allow directory browsing)

        app.UseFileServer(enableDirectoryBrowsing: false);

      • Setup routes for API

        app.UseMvc(routes =>
        {
            routes.MapRoute(
                  name: "api",
                  template: "api/{controller=Version}/{action=Index}/{id?}");
        });

• Verify changes by building server

  • $ dotnet build

Client Setup

• Create a new angular 2 app using the angular CLI
  • $ ng new DemoApp
• Move angular app to project's root directory
  • $ mv DemoApp/* .
    • This command moves everything except "dot files"
  • Move .editorconfig
    • $ mv DemoApp/.editorconfig .
  • Move git repo
    • $ mv DemoApp/.git .
  • Copy contents of DemoApp/.gitignore into ./gitignore
    • Find and uncomment #wwwroot
      • Remove the # character
  • Remove angular generated app root
    • $ rm -rf DemoApp
• Configure Angular CLI build output
  • Open angular-cli.json
    • Update outDir
      • "outDir": "wwwroot"
• Test client app build
  • $ ng build

Build Scripts

• Open project.json

  • Replace scripts with the following

  "scripts": {
    "ng": "ng",
    "prerestore": "npm install",
    "restore": "dotnet restore",
    "postrestore": "npm run build",
    "prestart": "npm run restore",
    "start": "dotnet run",
    "client": "ng serve",
    "lint": "tslint \"src/**/*.ts\"",
    "test": "ng test",
    "pree2e": "webdriver-manager update --standalone false --gecko false",
    "e2e": "protractor",
    "clean": "rimraf -- wwwroot",
    "postclean": "ng build",
    "prebuild": "npm run clean",
    "build": "dotnet build",
    "clean:prod": "rimraf -- wwwroot",
    "postclean:prod": "ng build --prod",
    "prebuild:prod": "npm run clean:prod",
    "build:prod": "dotnet publish -c release"
  }

Run App

• $ npm start
  • Wait for server to start
    • Now listening on: http://localhost:5000
  • Verify client application works
    • Open browser and navigate to http://localhost:5000
      • Notice app works! text from our AppComponent is displayed on the screen
  • Verify API is working
    • Navigate to http://localhost://5000/api/values
      • The response should be the following JSON ["value1","value2"]

[sebastiaoherodes]

@wickdninja Great Work!. Is there a way to use Visual Studio 2015?

[wickdninja]

@sebastiaoherodes I've used Visual Studio 2015 with a previous project using a similar setup. However, I still used VSCode for client side (angular) development, and only used Visual Studio for .Net code. If I can find some free time this weekend I'll extend the tutorial to include a similar setup. Off the top of my head I think the only differences would be to install the NPM Task Runner extension, disable Typescript compilation in Visual Studio 2015, and then inside the project.json file in the scripts section call the appropriate npm script or angular-cli command.

Such as

  "scripts": {
    "prebuild": "ng build"
}

Do you think this would be a useful addition?

[michael-lang]

I wrote up a blog post on using Angular CLI inside of a Visual Studio MVC Web application with a different approach. All the relevant commands are included, plus a git repo with the final result and commits for each step along the way that you can review.

http://candordeveloper.com/2017/04/12/how-to-use-angular-cli-with-visual-studio-2017/

Essentially, you have 2 separate projects, a CLI project and an MVC web app (or core app), and a pre-build for the MVC web app does an ng build on the CLI project and copies the few output files to a folder of the MVC app which is then set as a Controller view. See the article for the details.