Huge number of files generated for every Angular project

Question

I wanted to start a simple hello world app for Angular.

When I followed the instructions in the official quickstart the installation created 32,000 files in my proje

Answer 1

You need to ensure that you're just deploying the dist (short for distributable) folder from your project generated by the Angular CLI. This allows the tool to take your source code and it's dependencies and only give you what you need in order to run your application.

That being said there is/was an issue with the Angular CLI in regards to production builds via `ng build --prod

Yesterday (August 2, 2016) a release was done which switched the build mechanism from broccoli + systemjs to webpack which successfully handles production builds.

Based upon these steps:

ng new test-project
ng build --prod

I am seeing a dist folder size of 1.1 MB across the 14 files listed here:

./app/index.js
./app/size-check.component.css
./app/size-check.component.html
./favicon.ico
./index.html
./main.js
./system-config.js
./tsconfig.json
./vendor/es6-shim/es6-shim.js
./vendor/reflect-metadata/Reflect.js
./vendor/systemjs/dist/system.src.js
./vendor/zone.js/dist/zone.js

Note Currently to install the webpack version of the angular cli, you must run... npm install angular-cli@webpack -g