This blog post explains the process to enable Angular Server Side Rendering(SSR) with Angular Universal and the process to deploy it in Docker container

The source code of the application demonstrated in this post present in Github

Setup Angular Application

If you already have an existing Angular application, you can skip this step

1. Create new application

ng new angular-ssr-docker

2. Add Angular material

ng add @angular/material

3. Import indigo-pink theme to application. Add following line to styles.scss

@import "~@angular/material/prebuilt-themes/indigo-pink.css";

4. Create two components, Login and Home. When user logs in, it redirects him to home page

Add Angular Universal

Based on instructions from Angular docs,

1. Add Angular Universal to the project

ng add @nguniversal/express-engine

and it will create the following folder structure

src/
  index.html                 app web page
  main.ts                    bootstrapper for client app
  main.server.ts             * bootstrapper for server app
  style.css                  styles for the app
  app/ ...                   application code
    app.server.module.ts     * server-side application module
server.ts                    * express web server
tsconfig.json                TypeScript base configuration
tsconfig.app.json            TypeScript browser application configuration
tsconfig.server.json         TypeScript server application configuration
tsconfig.spec.json           TypeScript tests configuration

2. By default when you add Angular Universal to project Angular CLI creates projects/angular-ssr-docker/architect/serve-ssr section in angular.json with 2 configurations development and production

3. The development configuration will be used when run npm run dev:ssr and production configuration will be when you build application in production mode

4. See below snapshot of typical configuration. For if you can not start an application for some reason make your development section as below

"configurations": {
  "development": {
    "browserTarget": "pdts:build",
    "serverTarget": "pdts:server",
    "proxyConfig": "src/proxy.conf.json"
  },

5. If you are like me, you can define additional configurations like dev, test as shown above

6. Now, open terminal in the project and start JSON server (mocks backend)

json-server — watch db.json

7. Open another terminal in same project and run the application

npm run dev:ssr

8. Go to http://localhost:4200 to see the application in action

Build Docker image

Before building docker image, you need to build the application

1. Build the application with following command. Make sure to replace —- configuration=dev with appropriate profile name like test or production when you build an application for different environment

sudo ng build --configuration=dev && sudo ng run pdts:server

2. Add following Dockerfile to build the docker image

## Use Node Slim image
FROM node:14-slim

## Copy source code
COPY . .

## Start the application
CMD ["node", "dist/angular-ssr-docker/server/main.js"]

3. Build Docker image with following command

docker build -t angular_ssr_docker .

3. Run the image on port 4000. You can change to different by changing port flag -p 5001:4000

docker run -p 4000:4000 angular_ssr_docker

4. Go to http://localhost:4000 to see the application in action

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The source code of the application can be found in Github. Happy Coding 🙂