This guide describes Angular Universal, a technology that renders Angular applications on the server.
A normal Angular application executes in the browser, rendering pages in the DOM in response to user actions. Angular Universal executes on the server, generating static application pages that later get bootstrapped on the client. This means that the application generally renders more quickly, giving users a chance to view the application layout before it becomes fully interactive.
For a more detailed look at different techniques and concepts surrounding SSR, please check out this article.
You can easily prepare an app for server-side rendering using the Angular CLI. The CLI schematic @nguniversal/express-engine performs the required steps, as described below.
Note: Download the finished sample code, which runs in a Node.js® Express server.
The Tour of Heroes tutorial is the foundation for this walkthrough.
In this example, the Angular CLI compiles and bundles the Universal version of the app with the Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compiler. A Node.js Express web server compiles HTML pages with Universal based on client requests.
To create the server-side app module, app.server.module.ts, run the following CLI command.
ng add @nguniversal/express-engine
The command creates the following folder structure.
src/
index.html app web page
main.ts bootstrapper for client app
main.server.ts * bootstrapper for server app
style.css styles for the app
app/ ... application code
app.server.module.ts * server-side application module
server.ts * express web server
tsconfig.json TypeScript base configuration
tsconfig.app.json TypeScript browser application configuration
tsconfig.server.json TypeScript server application configuration
tsconfig.spec.json TypeScript tests configuration The files marked with * are new and not in the original tutorial sample.
To start rendering your app with Universal on your local system, use the following command.
npm run dev:ssr
Open a browser and navigate to http://localhost:4200/. You should see the familiar Tour of Heroes dashboard page.
Navigation via routerLinks works correctly because they use the native anchor (<a>) tags. You can go from the Dashboard to the Heroes page and back. You can click a hero on the Dashboard page to display its Details page.
If you throttle your network speed so that the client-side scripts take longer to download (instructions below), you'll notice:
User events other than routerLink clicks aren't supported. You must wait for the full client app to bootstrap and run, or buffer the events using libraries like preboot, which allow you to replay these events once the client-side scripts load.
The transition from the server-rendered app to the client app happens quickly on a development machine, but you should always test your apps in real-world scenarios.
You can simulate a slower network to see the transition more clearly as follows:
The server-rendered app still launches quickly but the full client app may take seconds to load.
There are three main reasons to create a Universal version of your app.
Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites rely on web crawlers to index your application content and make that content searchable on the web. These web crawlers may be unable to navigate and index your highly interactive Angular application as a human user could do.
Angular Universal can generate a static version of your app that is easily searchable, linkable, and navigable without JavaScript. Universal also makes a site preview available since each URL returns a fully rendered page.
Some devices don't support JavaScript or execute JavaScript so poorly that the user experience is unacceptable. For these cases, you may require a server-rendered, no-JavaScript version of the app. This version, however limited, may be the only practical alternative for people who otherwise couldn't use the app at all.
Displaying the first page quickly can be critical for user engagement. Pages that load faster perform better, even with changes as small as 100ms. Your app may have to launch faster to engage these users before they decide to do something else.
With Angular Universal, you can generate landing pages for the app that look like the complete app. The pages are pure HTML, and can display even if JavaScript is disabled. The pages don't handle browser events, but they do support navigation through the site using routerLink.
In practice, you'll serve a static version of the landing page to hold the user's attention. At the same time, you'll load the full Angular app behind it. The user perceives near-instant performance from the landing page and gets the full interactive experience after the full app loads.
A Universal web server responds to application page requests with static HTML rendered by the Universal template engine. The server receives and responds to HTTP requests from clients (usually browsers), and serves static assets such as scripts, CSS, and images. It may respond to data requests, either directly or as a proxy to a separate data server.
The sample web server for this guide is based on the popular Express framework.
Note: Any web server technology can serve a Universal app as long as it can call Universal's
renderModule()function. The principles and decision points discussed here apply to any web server technology.
Universal applications use the Angular platform-server package (as opposed to platform-browser), which provides server implementations of the DOM, XMLHttpRequest, and other low-level features that don't rely on a browser.
The server (Node.js Express in this guide's example) passes client requests for application pages to the NgUniversal ngExpressEngine. Under the hood, this calls Universal's renderModule() function, while providing caching and other helpful utilities.
The renderModule() function takes as inputs a template HTML page (usually index.html), an Angular module containing components, and a route that determines which components to display. The route comes from the client's request to the server.
Each request results in the appropriate view for the requested route. The renderModule() function renders the view within the <app> tag of the template, creating a finished HTML page for the client.
Finally, the server returns the rendered page to the client.
Because a Universal app doesn't execute in the browser, some of the browser APIs and capabilities may be missing on the server.
For example, server-side applications can't reference browser-only global objects such as window, document, navigator, or location.
Angular provides some injectable abstractions over these objects, such as Location or DOCUMENT; it may substitute adequately for these APIs. If Angular doesn't provide it, it's possible to write new abstractions that delegate to the browser APIs while in the browser and to an alternative implementation while on the server (aka shimming).
Similarly, without mouse or keyboard events, a server-side app can't rely on a user clicking a button to show a component. The app must determine what to render based solely on the incoming client request. This is a good argument for making the app routable.
The important bit in the server.ts file is the ngExpressEngine() function.
// Our Universal express-engine (found @ https://github.com/angular/universal/tree/master/modules/express-engine)
server.engine('html', ngExpressEngine({
bootstrap: AppServerModule,
})); The ngExpressEngine() function is a wrapper around Universal's renderModule() function which turns a client's requests into server-rendered HTML pages. It accepts an object with the following properties:
bootstrap: The root NgModule or NgModule factory to use for bootstraping the app when rendering on the server. For the example app, it is AppServerModule. It's the bridge between the Universal server-side renderer and the Angular application.extraProviders: This is optional and lets you specify dependency providers that apply only when rendering the app on the server. You can do this when your app needs information that can only be determined by the currently running server instance.The ngExpressEngine() function returns a Promise callback that resolves to the rendered page. It's up to the engine to decide what to do with that page. This engine's Promise callback returns the rendered page to the web server, which then forwards it to the client in the HTTP response.
Note: These wrappers help hide the complexity of the
renderModule()function. There are more wrappers for different backend technologies at the Universal repository.
NOTE: The basic behavior described below is handled automatically when using the NgUniversal Express schematic. This is helpful when trying to understand the underlying behavior or replicate it without using the schematic.
The web server must distinguish app page requests from other kinds of requests.
It's not as simple as intercepting a request to the root address /. The browser could ask for one of the application routes such as /dashboard, /heroes, or /detail:12. In fact, if the app were only rendered by the server, every app link clicked would arrive at the server as a navigation URL intended for the router.
Fortunately, application routes have something in common: their URLs lack file extensions. (Data requests also lack extensions but they're easy to recognize because they always begin with /api.) All static asset requests have a file extension (such as main.js or /node_modules/zone.js/bundles/zone.umd.js).
Because we use routing, we can easily recognize the three types of requests and handle them differently.
/api.A Node.js Express server is a pipeline of middleware that filters and processes requests one after the other. You configure the Node.js Express server pipeline with calls to server.get() like this one for data requests.
// TODO: implement data requests securely
server.get('/api/**', (req, res) => {
res.status(404).send('data requests are not yet supported');
}); Note: This sample server doesn't handle data requests.
The tutorial's "in-memory web API" module, a demo and development tool, intercepts all HTTP calls and simulates the behavior of a remote data server. In practice, you would remove that module and register your web API middleware on the server here.
The following code filters for request URLs with no extensions and treats them as navigation requests.
// All regular routes use the Universal engine
server.get('*', (req, res) => {
res.render(indexHtml, { req, providers: [{ provide: APP_BASE_HREF, useValue: req.baseUrl }] });
}); A single server.use() treats all other URLs as requests for static assets such as JavaScript, image, and style files.
To ensure that clients can only download the files that they are permitted to see, put all client-facing asset files in the /dist folder and only honor requests for files from the /dist folder.
The following Node.js Express code routes all remaining requests to /dist, and returns a 404 - NOT FOUND error if the file isn't found.
// Serve static files from /browser
server.get('*.*', express.static(distFolder, {
maxAge: '1y'
})); The tutorial's HeroService and HeroSearchService delegate to the Angular HttpClient module to fetch application data. These services send requests to relative URLs such as api/heroes. In a server-side rendered app, HTTP URLs must be absolute (for example, https://my-server.com/api/heroes). This means that the URLs must be somehow converted to absolute when running on the server and be left relative when running in the browser.
If you are using one of the @nguniversal/*-engine packages (such as @nguniversal/express-engine), this is taken care for you automatically. You don't need to do anything to make relative URLs work on the server.
If, for some reason, you are not using an @nguniversal/*-engine package, you may need to handle it yourself.
The recommended solution is to pass the full request URL to the options argument of renderModule() or renderModuleFactory() (depending on what you use to render AppServerModule on the server). This option is the least intrusive as it does not require any changes to the app. Here, "request URL" refers to the URL of the request as a response to which the app is being rendered on the server. For example, if the client requested https://my-server.com/dashboard and you are rendering the app on the server to respond to that request, options.url should be set to https://my-server.com/dashboard.
Now, on every HTTP request made as part of rendering the app on the server, Angular can correctly resolve the request URL to an absolute URL, using the provided options.url.
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https://v10.angular.io/guide/universal