Bootstrapping in Angular: How It Works Internally

In this article on Bootstrapping in Angular, let us find out how Angular works internally and bootstraps our app. We use ng new to create a new Angular project. It generates lots of boilerplate codes. It also configures the Typescript, Webpack, Karma, & Protractor. The app, when run displays a simple HTML page with several useful links to Angular. Now let us break up this app and look at what happens when the app starts until it displays the HTML page

Applies to: Angular 2 to the latest edition of i.e. Angular 8. Angular 9, Angular 10, Angular 11, Angular 12

Bootstrapping in Angular

What is a Bootstrapping

Bootstrapping is a technique of initializing or loading our Angular application.

let’s walk through our code created in Create your First new Angular project and see what happens at each stage and how our AppComponent gets loaded and displays “app works!”. The Angular takes the following steps to load our first view.

1. Index.html loads
2. Angular, Third-party libraries & Application loads
3. Main.ts the application entry point
4. Root Module
5. Root Component
6. Template

Index.html Loads First

Web apps need a starting point. Index.html is usually the first page to load. Let us open the file and find out what it contains. You will find it under the src folder.

There are no javascript files in the index.html. Neither you can see a stylesheet file. The body of the files has the following HTML tag.

How do Angular loads ?.  To Find out, let us build our application

Building Application

To run our application, we use the Angular CLI command ng serve or NPM command npm start (npm start command actually translates into ng serve.)

ng serve does build our application but does not save the compiled application to the disk. It saves it in memory and starts the development server.

We use ng build to build our app. Open the command prompt and run the command. This will build and copy the output files to the dist folder

Use ng build --prod to build and distribute the app for production. For testing/debugging use ng build. The production build optimizes, minimize and uglify the code.

Now open the dist and open the index.html.

You can see that the compiler included five script files. They are runtime, polyfills, styles, vendor, & main. All these files have two versions one is es5 & the other one es2015

Since the Angular 7, we have new feature called conditional polyfill loading. Now Angular builds two script files, one for es2015 & another for es5. The es2015 (es6) is for modern browser and es5 is older browsers, which do not support the new features of es2015.

Note the nomodule attribute, which tells the modern browser to ignore the script and do not load it. Hence es5 scripts are not loaded in the modern browsers

runtime.js: Webpack runtime file
polyfills.js – Polyfill scripts for supporting the variety of the latest modern browsers
styles.js – This file contains the global style rules bundled as javascript file.
vendor.js – contains the scripts from the Angular core library and any other 3rd party library.
main.js – code of the application.

The Angular Version 2 generated only three script files ( inline.js, styles.bundle.js & main.bundle.js).

These files are added by the Webpack module loader.

What is Webpack?

Webpack is a bundler. it scans our application looking for javascript files and merges them into one ( or more) big file. Webpack has the ability to bundle any kind of file like JavaScript, CSS, SASS, LESS, images, HTML, & fonts, etc.

The Angular CLI uses Webpack as a module bundler. Webpack needs a lot of configuration options to work correctly. The Angular CLI sets up all these configuration options behind the scene.

The Webpack traverses through our application looking for javascript and other files and merges all of them into one or more bundles. In our example application, it has created five files.

Application Loads

So when index.html is loaded, the Angular core libraries, third-party libraries are loaded. Now the angular needs to locate the entry point.

Application Entry point

The entry point of our application is main.ts. You will find it under the src folder.

angular.json

The Angular finds out the entry point from the configuration file angular.json. This file is located in the root folder of the project. The relevant part of the angular.json is shown below

The angular-cli.json was the configuration file in Angular 5 and before. It is now angular.json since the version Angular 6.

The main entry under the node projects -> GettingStarted -> architect -> build -> options points towards the src/main.ts. This file is the entry point of our application.

main.ts Application entry point

The main.ts file is as shown below.

Let us look at the relevant code in detail.

This line imports the module platformBrowserDynamic from the library@angular/platform-browser-dynamic.

What is platformBrowserDynamic

platformBrowserDynamic is the module, which is responsible for loading the Angular application in the desktop browser.

The Angular Applications can be bootstrapped in many ways and in many platforms. For example, we can load our application in a Desktop Browser or in a mobile device with Ionic or NativeScript.

If you are using the nativescript, then you will be using platformNativeScriptDynamic from nativescript-angular/platform library and will be calling platformNativeScriptDynamic().bootstrapModule(AppModule). Read more about Angular Nativescript bootstrap process from here

The above line imports AppModule. The AppModule is the Root Module of the app. The Angular applications are organized as modules. Every application built in Angular must have at least one module. The module, which is loaded first when the application is loaded is called a root module.

TheplatformBrowserDynamic loads the root module by invoking the bootstrapModule and giving it the reference to our Root module i.e AppModule

Root Module

The angular bootstrapper loads our root module AppModule. The AppModule is located under the folder src/app. The code of our Root module is shown below

The root module must have at least one root component. The root component is loaded, when the module is loaded by the Angular.

In our example, AppComponent is our root component. Hence we import it.

We use @NgModule class decorator to define a Angular Module and provide metadata about the Modules.

The @NgModule has several metadata properties.

imports

We need to list all the external modules required including other Angular modules, that is used by this Angular Module

Declarations

The Declarations array contains the list of components, directives, & pipes that belong to this Angular Module. We have only one component in our application AppComponent.

Providers

The Providers array, is where we register the services we create. The Angular Dependency injection framework injects these services in components, directives. pipes and other services.

Bootstrap

The component that angular should load, when this Angular Module loads. The component must be part of this module. We want AppComponent load when AppModule loads, hence we list it here.

The Angular reads the bootstrap metadata and loads the AppComponent

Component

Finally, we arrive at AppComponent, which is the root component of the AppModule. The code of our AppComponent is shown below

The Class AppComponent is decorated with @Component Class Decorator.

The @Component class decorator provides the metadata about the class to the Angular. It has 3 properties in the above code. Selector, templateURL & styleUrls

templateURL

This property contains an HTML template, which is going to be displayed in the browser. The template file is app.component.html

Selector

This property specifies the CSS Selector, where our template will be inserted into the HTML. The CSS Selector in our code is app-root

Template

The AppComponent defines the template as app.component.htmland the CSS Selector is app-root

Our index.html already have the app-root CSS selector defined

The Angular locates app-root in our index.html and renders our template between those tags.

Source Code

Download the source code gitHub. The Code is available in GettingStarted Folder

Summary

We learned how Angular works internally and bootstraps our app.