express + angular 2 made easy

I’m pretty new to Angular JS/2/4/5, but I must say, I’ve been delighted playing with it. I used to do things the “old fashioned” way of jQuery and manipulating the DOM. Seems so antiquated now that I’ve seen the light … of the Angular variety of course.

[side note: from now on, when I say Angular I’m referring to the new way of doing Angular, that is Angular 2, 4 or 5. If you’re new to Angular, I would recommend just skipping AngularJS and go straight to Angular 2! You’ll thank me later.]

I’ve still got a lot to learn, and I look forward to it, but there has been an issue that doesn’t seem to have a good clean solution. I’ve cobbled a few articles together to document something that I couldn’t find a good solution to. That being, how to get a project started with nodejs/express and have it dish out Angular. I know, I know. Angular is a front end framework, you can have any web server serve it up. Yes, that’s true. And yes, in larger projects, you’ll likely be dishing out the Angular from nginx or apache or something other than nodejs/express. But also true is that if you’re doing something with Angular, chances are high that you’ll be requiring some sort of back-end web service to back it up. Chances are also pretty good that that back-end web service will be done in nodejs (with or without express). So if you fall into that group, read on! Continue reading “express + angular 2 made easy”