Hosting an Angular Web application in IIS server

ASP.Net Core provides a number of project templates out of the box, one of which is ASP.Net Core with Angular. You can use this to bootstrap your Angular SPA from within .Net core application and host it within IIS. However, many prefer using Angular CLI to develop an Angular application due to its simplicity and power and as part of this post I’ll be focusing on hosting this in IIS. In case you are new to Angular, that’s fine too as I’ll be covering the basic steps required to create an Angular application.

CodeProject

We’ll approach this in 4 steps

Install Node and Angular CLI
Create a simple Angular SPA (hello-world application)
Host this Angular application locally from console
Host this Angular application in IIS

1. Install Node and Angular CLI

We’ll first create a hello world Angular application. You’ll need to have nodejs installed on your machine. Check if node is installed on your machine using

node --version

In case you don’t have node installed on your machine, you may download the latest version from here. Install the LTS version preferably. At the time of writing this blog the latest LTS version of Node was v8.10.0 The node installation also comes with a package manager called npm (Node Package Manager). We’ll use this to install other 3rd party libraries.

We’ll first install Angular CLI using npm.

npm install -g @angular/cli

This will install Angular CLI, to verify the same we can use …

PS C:\dev\AngularInIIS> ng --version

Angular CLI: 1.7.3
Node: 8.10.0
OS: win32 x64
Angular:
...
PS C:\dev\AngularInIIS>

This will show the installed version of Angular CLI, Node and a few other libraries. We can now use this Angular CLI to create an Angular application.

2. Create a simple Angular SPA

We’ll create a hello world application using Angular CLI. It will

Create a new Angular project
Generate some boiler plate code
Create deployable packages

ng new hello-world

This will create the new project and install the dependent packages using npm.

3. Host this Angular application locally from console

Now that the basic application is ready we’ll host the application from console using ng serve ….

PS C:\dev\AngularInIIS\hello-world> ng serve
** NG Live Development Server is listening on localhost:4200, open your browser on http://localhost:4200/ **
Date: 2018-03-18T16:03:02.250Z
Hash: a99bdded108353b66e5f
Time: 7041ms
chunk {inline} inline.bundle.js (inline) 3.85 kB [entry] [rendered]
chunk {main} main.bundle.js (main) 18 kB [initial] [rendered]
chunk {polyfills} polyfills.bundle.js (polyfills) 549 kB [initial] [rendered]
chunk {styles} styles.bundle.js (styles) 41.5 kB [initial] [rendered]
chunk {vendor} vendor.bundle.js (vendor) 7.42 MB [initial] [rendered]

webpack: Compiled successfully.

You can now open the browser and browse the url http://localhost:4200/. You’ll find the hello world page as follows …

Console hosted Angular app

4. Host this Angular application in IIS

Hosting the Angular application in IIS will be done through the following steps…

Use Angular CLI to create a build artifact
Create a Web application in IIS
Install URL rewrite module in IIS
Add web.config with a URL rewrite rule
Use Angular CLI to create a production package

1. Use Angular CLI to create a build artifact

We can use Angular CLI to build the angular project and create a build artifact as follows …

ng build

Once the build completes successfully it publishes all the build artifacts to the dist folder.

Dist folder

We’ll be hosting the build artifacts from this folder in IIS in the subsequent steps.

2. Create a Web application in IIS

Create a new web site or web application or virtual directory in IIS to host the Angular application. Anyone of these will do. For the sake of this walkthrough we’ll create a new website SPA and create new web application HelloWorld under it.

SPA website

Hello World web application

Hierarchy in IIS

3. Install URL rewrite module in IIS

This step is required to support deep-linking. Deep-linking is the capability for the user to navigate directly to a page by typing the route into the address bar instead of using the Angular routing. Deep-linking causes a problem for IIS because the URL that the user attempts to access is not known to the server and therefore the user receives a 404 response. The solution is for the server to always return the root of the application, even if the user requests a path within the application.

Install the URL rewrite module from this link - https://www.iis.net/downloads/microsoft/url-rewrite

After installing you should see a new icon in IIS Manager.

URL rewrite module in IIS

4. Add web.config with a URL rewrite rule

We’ll now add a web.config file in which we’ll have the URL rewrite rule. All requests to this web application that are not for files or folders should be redirected to the root of the application. For an web application or virtual directory under the default web site, the URL should be set to the alias, (e.g. /MyApp/). For a web site at the root of the server, the URL should be set to /.

In our case since we are using the web application HelloWorld we’ll set the url /HelloWorld/

<configuration>
<system.webServer>
  <rewrite>
    <rules>
      <rule name="Redirect all requests" stopProcessing="true">
        <match url=".*" />
        <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll">
            <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" />
            <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" />
        </conditions>
        <action type="Rewrite" url="/HelloWorld/" />
        <!--<action type="Rewrite" url="/" />-->
        </rule>
    </rules>
  </rewrite>
</system.webServer>
</configuration>

We’ll create this web.config in src folder and to ensure that this file gets copied to dist folder each time a build is generated we’ll also make an entry in the assets section in angular-cli.json.

Web config file entry in assets section

We can now build the angular project and verify that the web.config file is indeed published in the dist folder. Once confirmed, there is one more step pending. We need to ensure that the base href value in index.html has the value / if we host the application directly in the website or /MyApp/ if it is hosted in the web application under the web site. In our case this value should be /HelloWorld/

Base href in index.html

We can update the above manually, or during creation of the build using the parameter --base-href

ng build --base-href "/HelloWorld/"

With this we can now browse the url http://localhost/HelloWorld/ from the browser. This should load our hello world page.