Getting Started With Angular 5 Using Visual Studio Code

Introduction

In this article, we are going to set up Angular 5 app using Visual Studio Code. We will be using Angular CLI for our demo.

Agenda

• Install Node.js.
• Install Angular CLI.
  
• Create our first Angular App.
  
• Launch Angular App in the browser.
  
• Displaying our custom message on Webpage.
• Conclusion

Install Node.js

The first step is to install Node.js. Open node.js download page from here. You will see the following display.

 

Download and install the latest LTS version as per the configuration of your machine. The current version of Node LTS is 8.9.2. Installing node.js will also install npm (node package manager) on your system.

To check the version of node and npm installed on your machine, run the following command in command prompt.

• node -v 
• npm -v

Install Angular CLI

Since node and npm are installed, the next step is to install Angular CLI. Run the following command in a command window.

•  npm install -g @angular/cli

This will start Angular CLI installation on your machine. This is going to take some time; so sit back, make some coffee, and relax. 

 

Create your first Angular App

Once Angular CLI is installed successfully, open VS Code and navigate to View >> Integrated Terminal.

This will open the terminal window, as shown in the image below.

Type the following sequence of commands in the terminal window. These commands will create a directory with name “AngularDemo” and then create an Angular application with the name “myFirstApp” inside that directory.

• mkdir AngularDemo
• cd AngularDemo
• ng new myFirstApp

And that’s it. We have created our first Angular app using VS Code and Angular CLI.

Launch Angular App in browser

The name of our Angular application is myFirstApp which is inside AngularDemo directory.

So, we will first navigate to our application using the below commands.

• cd AngularDemo
• cd myFirstApp

Now, we use the following command to start the web server.

• ng serve 

After running this command, you can see that it is asking to open http://localhost:4200 in your browser. So, open any browser on your machine and navigate to this URL. Now, you can see the following page.


We'll leave the web server running while we look into the code of this application. Open another VS Code window by navigating to File >> New Window and run the following set of commands in terminal.

• cd AngularDemo 
• code .

This will open the code file of our application in a new VS Code window. You can see the following file structure in Solution Explorer.

 

Displaying our custom message on Webpage

Now, we need to change the message on the web page from “Welcome to app!” to “Welcome to the world of Angular 5!”

To achieve this, open /src/app/app.component.ts file.

Change the value of title property in AppComponent class to " the world of Angular 5".

import {
    Component
} from '@angular/core';
@Component({
    selector: 'app-root',
    templateUrl: './app.component.html',
    styleUrls: ['./app.component.css']
})
export class AppComponent {
    title = 'the world of Angular 5';
}

Just save the file and navigate to http://localhost:4200 (remember that the web server is still running). You can see the updated web page as shown below.

If the web server is running and you make any changes in the Angular application, then you don’t need to refresh the web page. It will automatically update itself as you save the application code file. Try changing the title string to any custom value of your choice without closing the browser and see what happens as you save the application.

Conclusion

We have learned about creating our first Angular 5 app using VS Code and Angular CLI. We have also displayed a custom message on the webpage by changing class property. Please post your valuable feedback in comments section. Stay tuned for more articles.