While the convention-oriented approach of Angular-CLI can be a positive thing for many developers, sometimes, you may find the need to manually take back control of your build process and project configuration. Luckily, there is an easy way to convert an Angular-CLI project to a generic project using the eject command.
Ejecting Angular-CLI from your project
Getting ready
Let's take back control of our Angular application's build process from Angular-CLI. We may need this to do a variety of tasks, including customizing WebPack builds or just getting more granular control of our local web server runs. Ironically, we will use Angular-CLI to remove our application from Angular-CLI's control.
How to do it...
Perform the following steps to remove Angular-CLI from your project:
- First, you must remove your start script from your package.json file, as it will be overwritten in this process.
- Then, run the ng eject command:
==========================================================================
Ejection was successful.
To run your builds, you now need to do the following commands:
- "npm run build" to build.
- "npm run test" to run unit tests.
- "npm start" to serve the app using webpack-dev-server.
- "npm run e2e" to run protractor.
Running the equivalent CLI commands will result in an error.
==========================================================================
Some packages were added. Please run "npm install".
How it works...
Your project has been fully converted over to a standard Angular project, with a fully defined build toolchain ready in a new webpack.config.js file. Note that this conversion is a one-way process, and should only be done if you are ready to take full control of your application's build process.
The build process that remains is actually a standard WebPack based build. We will discuss WebPack builds and how to customize them for your application more in Chapter 9, Build Systems and Optimizations.
