angular-cli/docs/documentation/stories/app-shell.md

Documentation below is deprecated and we no longer accept PRs to improve this. The new documentation will be available in angular.io.

App shell

App shell is a way to render a portion of your application via a route at build time. This gives users a meaningful first paint of your application because the browser does not need to initialize any JavaScript, just rendering the HTML.

Steps

Step 1: Prepare the application

An application must be set up with routing. This can be accomplished by running:

ng new my-app --routing

Or if you have an existing application you can manually add routing by including the RouterModule and defining a <router-outlet> within your app.

Step 2: Create the app shell

ng generate app-shell --client-project my-app --universal-project server-app

my-app is the name of your client application server-app is the name of the universal (or server) application

After running this command you will notice that the angular.json configuration file has been updated. Two new targets were added (and a few other changes):

"server": {
  "builder": "@angular-devkit/build-angular:server",
  "options": {
    "outputPath": "dist/my-app-server",
    "main": "src/main.server.ts",
    "tsConfig": "src/tsconfig.server.json"
  }
},
"app-shell": {
  "builder": "@angular-devkit/build-angular:app-shell",
  "options": {
    "browserTarget": "my-app:build",
    "serverTarget": "my-app:server",
    "route": "shell"
  }
}

Step 3: Verify the app is built with the shell content

build with the app shell target

ng run my-app:app-shell

If you would like to build for production you should run the following command

ng run my-app:app-shell:production
ng run my-app:app-shell --configuration production

Verify the build output Open dist/index.html look for text "app-shell works!" which verifies that the app shell route was rendered as part of the output