Generating the Server App

Since Angular CLI version 1.6, there has been a generator for adding support for Angular Universal. It does this by adding a second app to the Angular CLI config, .angular-cli.json.

We will refer to this new app as our server app, and the one we worked with in the previous lesson will be called our browser app.

So, what are the differences between the browser and server apps?

• Both load another platform which behaves differently.

• The browser app uses code splitting, which builds the app in various smaller files. This improves load times in the browser. The server builds the app without code splitting as there are no benefits to do this on the server.

• The browser app loads a greater number of polyfills. These are small JavaScript libraries that add functionality to the browser, if the browser does not support them yet. This is not needed for the server.

Let's explore in some more detail what happens when we run the generator:

Running this generator will change a few things...