how to run angular 4 app and nodejs api on same port 4200 for both production and development?

Question

I have created angular 4 app and I can run it using ng serve --open and it runs on localhost:4200 , what I want is I have also created api using <

Answer 1

You can't have two different applications running on the same port. Angular-cli uses a nodejs server (technically it's webpack-dev-server) behind the scenes when you run ng serve, which means that port is already in use.

There are two possible solutions.

1. Use your node application to serve the static frontend files. Then you can't really use ng serve (this is probably what you'd do when running live).

2. Use nodejs with a different port, and use Angular's proxy config, to have Angular think the api port is actually 4200 (this is probably best during development).

This is primarily a concern during development I reckon, since you most likely wont (and shouldn't) be using ng serve live, so option 2 would be my best recommendation.

To configure a proxy, you create a file in your angular application root directory called proxy.config.json with the following content:

{
  "/api/*": {
    "target": "http://localhost:3000",
    "secure": false,
    "changeOrigin": true
  }
}

Then when you run ng serve, you run it with ng serve --proxy-config proxy.config.json instead.

Here's a link to the documentation

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Here's an alternative when building for production (solution 1 above):

To build in production you use ng build --prod to create a production ready Angular build and then (assuming you use Express on your node server), use something like app.use(express.static('dist/')) as explained in the Express documentation. I'm not using node myself (I'm using .NET Core) so I'm afraid I can't provide much more in terms of details.