Building Angular apps is a fun project. Once you're done building, it's time to expand the fun by sharing your project with the world.

While there's many ways to host our Angular application, we'll be looking at how to host with Firebase since Firebase makes it super simple. Firebase offers many great features (and has a solid free plan).

Realtime Database

Hosting

Authentication

Cloud Functions

Cloud Storage

Bunch More

We'll just be using Firebase hosting to handle our Angular app.

TLDR: What's the Overall Process

The Angular CLI will create our dist files: ng build --prod

files: We'll deploy using Firebase command line tools: firebase deploy

Firebase will host and handle routing!

We'll be using the Angular CLI to create our Angular app that we'll deploy. For more info on the CLI, check out our article: Use the Angular CLI For Faster Angular v2+ Projects.

Install the CLI

If you don't already have the CLI installed, we can do it using Node and npm.

npm install -g @angular/cli

Note: The -g flag is to install globally across our entire machine.

Start an Angular App

Once we have the CLI, we can create a new Angular app and test it out using the following:

Upgrade Your JS Go from vanilla JavaScript 👉 React

Watch for FREE

ng new hosty-app cd hosty-app ng serve --open

Our app is good to go! Let's start setting up our Firebase app.

We'll need to create a Firebase account and a Firebase app so that our application knows where to deploy to. Once you login to your Firebase console, create a new app.

We'll name our app Angular Hosting Test. You can also set the subdomain for your app. Your app will be hosted at subdomain.firebase-app.com.

Our new app is live! That's all we had to do in the Firebase dashboard. The rest of the work will be done on our own computer in our applications.

In order to deploy to Firebase, we'll need the Firebase CLI tools. Here's the steps we're about to take:

Download the tools

Login to Firebase using the tools

Link our local app to our Firebase app

We'll use npm to install similar to how we installed the Angular CLI:

npm install -g firebase-tools

Login to Firebase

We'll use the CLI tools to login to Firebase.

firebase login

This will open your browser and allow us to login from there.

That's it! We're all ready to start using the Firebase tools.

The first step is to link our local Angular app to our Firebase app we created in the Firebase dashboard.

firebase init

Here's the answers to the questions Firebase tools will ask:

Are you ready to proceed? Yes

Which Firebase CLI features? Hosting (In the future, use whatever you need! Press space to select.)

(In the future, use whatever you need! Press space to select.) Select a default Firebase project? Angular Hosting Test (Choose whatever app you created in the earlier steps)

(Choose whatever app you created in the earlier steps) What do you want to use as your public directory? dist (This is important! Angular creates the dist folder.)

(This is important! Angular creates the folder.) Configure as a single-page app? Yes

You may be asking, what exactly does this command do? This creates two new files:

.firebaserc : Sets the Firebase project we're linking to

{ "projects" : { "default" : "angular-hosting" } }

firebase.json : Sets the hosting folder and rewrites

{ "hosting" : { "public" : "dist" , "rewrites" : [ { "source" : "**" , "destination" : "/index.html" } ] } }

Our app is now linked to our Firebase app. We're ready to finally deploy!

The deploy is essentially two steps:

Create the production files in the dist folder

folder Deploy to Firebase!

Build Our Angular App

We'll create our production files using the Angular CLI command:

ng build --prod

This will create a brand new dist/ folder in our project with the files necessary to launch our app. You could take these files and open the index.html file locally and see your app running!

Deploy to Firebase

Now that we have the dist/ folder, we can tell Firebase to deploy it:

firebase deploy

Our app is now deployed and ready to view! Run this Firebase command to see it in action:

firebase open hosting:site

https://angular-hosting.firebaseapp.com/

You can visit the Firebase dashboard to see the logs of all your deployments. You can even set a custom domain in the dashboard.

If you want to automate the process of building and deploying, you can add a script to your package.json file:

"scripts" : { ... "deploy" : "ng build --prod && firebase deploy" } ,

Now we can run the deploy script with:

npm run deploy

Watch as both commands run and our site is updated!

With Firebase hosting, it's an easy process to deploy our Angular CLI apps to production. In the future we'll be exploring more options with other hosting providers, but Firebase is a fast, free, and easy way to host quick Angular apps.

Like this article? Follow @chrisoncode on Twitter