Welcome to
The newline Guide to Angular Universal
Master Production-Ready SSR and Deployments with Angular
Course Syllabus and Content
Introduction
2 Lessons
Introduction to Guide to Angular Universal
This lesson answers the questions "What do I need to accomplish the course?" "What software is needed?" "What should I know about Angular and other technologies?" "What should I do to accomplish the course offline?"
Building the app
9 Lessons
In this course module, you will build a production-ready Angular application. It will consist of a list of products with pictures, descriptions, and prices. Each product will have a dedicated landing page. You will also develop the functionality of adding products to a list of favorites and displaying that list. You will build a back-end and API to feed your application with data. The data will be retrieved from MongoDB provisioned in your Heroku application.
Most projects start from scratch. This one is not an exception. In this lesson you will initialize the Angular application using CLI, include the Cascading StyleSheet, set up routing and basic components.
In this lesson you will prepare the application backend an entry gate for communicating with persistance layer and hosting Angular application bundle.
Every application needs a persistence layer. This lesson will show you how to enroll for free Atlas cloud MongoDB instance. You will also feed your database with data.
Once the database is set up and ready, you need to establish a connection with it. That's what you're going to do in this part of the course. Apart of that you will create backend API to get list of products and their descriptions.
We're building software for people, and we need to give them a way to communicate with it. This lesson will show you how to prepare an API for user interaction like loging in and adding products to list of favorites. Moreover you will be introduced to the security essentials like cookies encryption and password hashing.
When the backend is ready, it's time for frontend. In this lesson you will integrate user API with Angular. You will implement the user authentication flow.
Our application would be nothing without the data. In this course part you will display products images, description and prices in your Angular application.
Every journey has some end. At the end of software development is production. It's time to deploy your application to Heroku and test with multiple tools how it performs.
Applying Angular Universal
7 Lessons
In the previous module, you've built a fully functional production-ready application. Unfortunately, like other single-page applications, this application has its weaknesses. In this module, you will learn how to address one of them and render HTML content on the server.
The easiest way to enhance your Angular project with new functionalities is to use Schematics - a set of instruction for CLI on how to change the project and install new dependencies. Let's do that with Angular Universal and review what Schematics did for us.
Once the application is said to be SEO friendly and performance optimized by schemtaics - let's check that in battlefield. In this lesson you will deploy your project to Heroku and measure its performance.
Unfortunately, schematics are not a magic wand and they won't solve all of your problems. Sometimes your project needs to be adjusted to do not break Server-Side Rendering process. Here's what might go wrong, and how to address that.
In this lesson, you will add even more for SEO. Your application deserves robots.txt and proper sitemap.
Next step in SEO is to set up meta-tags. If you want to know how to do it in Angular, this lesson will help you to find the answer.
In this lesson, you can see how Angular Universal helps when your user's browser doesn't support JavaScript
Browser vs. Server
5 Lessons
In this course module, you will learn how to pass objects and function references from Node.js to Angular Universal sandbox. You will build a service that will be used to connect with MongoDB and perform queries. You will also gain knowledge on how to prepare a server-equivalent of services used in browser-side Angular; and how to improve your application performance thanks to them. You will also make your application fully functional for users with disabled JavaScript.
One of possible improvements is to perform queries against MongoDB directly from Angular Universal. In this lesson you will create a service which does this job.
Once your MongoService is in place, you need to prepare a server-equivalent of ProductsService. This service will query MongoService for products list and descriptions and embed those in the HTML rendered by Angular Universal.
Next step is to create a server-equivalent of service responsible for user interactions. This lesson will show you how to read HTTP requests in Angular, get cookies from it and decrypt them.
Once you know how to read cookies in the Angular Universal app, it's time to learn how to set them up. In this lesson, you will make your application fully functional for users whose browser doesn't support JavaScript at all.
Transfering data between server and browser
4 Lessons
Say Hello to TransferState, a key-value registry that is passed along with the application bundle, from the server-side angular to the browser-side part of the application. In this lesson you will learn how frontend can get to know what backend has already do (ie retrieving data from DB); thanks to that you can avoid repeating those steps and offload your application backend.
Next step is to get know a TransferHttpCacheModule, which provides the TransferState functionality "out of the box" for the HTTP calls.
Long running API calls can affect your application rendering time, that might lead to the SEO disaster. In this lesson you will learn how you can protect your application against such situation.
In this module, you've learned how to pass data between the server and the browser using the
TransferStateregistry. You've also introducedTransferHttpCacheModulethat passes data obtained via HTTP during server-side rendering to the browser. You've learned how to abandon long-running REST API calls that affect rendering performance.
Caching with Redis
4 Lessons
Wanna be a performance beast? It's time to cache! In this module, you will use the Redis database to implement server-side caching and improve Time To First Byte. From now on, only selected requests will trigger the rendering process. The rendered output will be kept in Redis for a specified period of time. Subsequent requests will be served with data retrieved from Redis.
First things first. Let's install the Redis DB on your machine and provision it in the Heroku environment.
In this lesson you will create a Node.JS middle-ware, that will be responsible for caching rendered views inside Redis database.
Faster! Faster! Faster! In this lesson you will enable gzip compression, defer the CSS, lazy-load images and more. All to make it faster!
Testing
5 Lessons
How to verify your application behavior in different environments? In this lesson you will get to know how you can stub the PLATFORM_ID injection token and HTTP request, for tests purpose.
Next step is to simulate a long-running API and verify how server-side Angular deals with it. This lesson will demonstrate you how to do that.
Last but not least of your unit tests, should be to verify the server-specific services. In this lesson you will learn how to enforce Karma to run tests against code that includes server-specific objects and libraries.
In this lesson you will learn how you can verify the TransferState registry content in your E2E tests.
This lesson is going to show you how to mock your data-source - MongoDB - for the E2E tests purpose. Thanks to using mongo-unit you will be able to perform actions that changes data in your DB, during E2E testing.
Prerendering
2 Lessons
In this module, you'll learn how to adjust the Angular application to be pre-renderable. Such prepared application can be deployed on static hosting like GitHub pages and still be SEO friendly! You will feed your application with data retrieved from MongoDB during the prerendering process.
What is prerendering and how Angular Universal supports it? This lesson will answer that questio and show you what steps you need to take, to make your application prerenderable.
Summary
1 Lesson
That was a bumpy ride, but definetely worth it. In this lesson we will summarize what you've learned so far and how ng --prod differentiate from Universal and Prerendered application.