I'd like to to know if it is possible to hook into angular-cli's build/watch command:
ng build /w
which generates files and drops them in the project's /dist
folder
I just want after the build completes to copy the dist folder to another directory, is it possible?
If you just want to change the folder that it outputs to you can set that in the angular-cli.json
file. There is an 'outdir
' setting in that you can change to be the folder you want it to output to.
I managed to achieve what I wanted with parallel tasks, copyfiles and npm watch:
npm dev dependencies:
"npm-watch": "^0.1.8",
"parallelshell": "^2.0.0",
"copyfiles": "^1.2.0",
package.json snippet:
"watch": {
"copy-files": "dist/*.js"
},
"scripts": {
"ng": "ng",
"start": "ng serve",
"lint": "tslint \"src/**/*.ts\" --project src/tsconfig.json --type-check && tslint \"e2e/**/*.ts\" --project e2e/tsconfig.json --type-check",
"test": "ng test",
"pree2e": "webdriver-manager update --standalone false --gecko false",
"e2e": "protractor",
"watch": "npm-watch",
"copy-files": "copyfiles src/** dist/** ../angular",
"ng-build": "ng build -w",
"build": "parallelshell \"ng build\" \"npm run watch\" "
},
Then
npm run build
FWIW the watch config is saying, if anything in dist/*.js changes, run the "copy-files" npm script...
One way is to run npm run build
and have a postbuild
script that copies the content of index.html from your dist folder to your html/cshtml file in your desired folder and changes the script and link tag's paths in your newly copied file to point to the dist folder after the build it complete. Now run ng build --watch
and start development.
I'm using angular 6
and angular-cli
with .Net MVC 4.5
and I use ~\Views\Home
as my desired destination folder.
To have the watch mode running in my project I Run npm run build:watch
Now the watch mode works. Below is my package.json
:
"scripts": {
"ng": "ng",
"build": "ng build",
"build:watch": "npm run build && ng build --watch",
"build:prod": "ng build --prod && npm run postbuild",
"postbuild": "npm run copyindex && npm run fixpath",
"copyindex": "copy /D \".\\dist\\index.html\" \"Views\\Home\\Index.cshtml\" /Y",
"fixpath": "powershell -Command \"(gc Views\\Home\\Index.cshtml) -replace '(\\w+\\.js|\\w+\\.css)', '~/dist/$1' | Out-File Views\\Home\\Index.cshtml\"",
},
package.json explanation :
after running npm run build
the postbuild
gets called automatically. postbuild
will call copyindex
and fixpath
one after another.
copyindex
will copy the content of my dist\index.html
to my Views\Home\Index.cshtml
.
fixpath
will add ~/dist/
to the beginning of all js and css file paths in my Index.cshtml
.
build:watch
: calls ng build --watch
.
build:prod
: is for prod build and calls ng build --prod
and postbuild
one after another.
Note
- The commands can be run in any console on windows (cmd or bash).
- I used
powershell
in my fixpath
. It can be replaced by your favorite tool.
You should create your own node build script which calls the ng build
command and after that copies the files to a directory:
let thread = exec('ng build -e=prod --prod', { maxBuffer: 1024 * 5000});
thread.on('close', (data) => {
//do your moving stuff here
});
There is no way to hook into the cli
(yet), and I don't think they will allow it. As far as I remember, they like to keep things closed there, because this way they are able to change/tune/update the build process a lot, without older builds going haywire