Tweaking It a Bit

Now that Hello World is running, we want to look at a feature that NPM scripts provide to make development easier.

ng serve

ng serve is the Angular CLI web server that runs locally (localhost) in your browser. When you run npm start (the script that runs ng serve), you’ll see information about the build processor, and hopefully an indication that the build is now valid.

Figure 9: Start Up

Tip: The --open (or shortcut --o) option on the ng serve command opens your default browser to show your application.

The ng serve command is also looking at the folder and detecting changes. If you keep the browser open and change your source files, you’ll see that the program detects the change, recompiles the code, and refreshes the browser on the fly.

Figure 10: Detecting Changes

This watching for changes and incrementally compiling them makes it easier to make code updates and immediately see the impact of the change. It will show you which file was changed, and then update your browser with the changes—a nice feature during your development cycle.

Summary

Once your application is started, the tools provided give you a nice environment to explore and see what is happening behind the scenes.