I'm making use of ng-bootstrap's ngbDatepicker in a Reactive Form in an Angular2 project, and the dates are optional, however ngbDatepicker always marks the form as Invalid unless a date is selected. Is there a way to exclude ngbDatepicker from the form validation, or to configure it so that it returns Valid whether it has a value set or not? The issue was with how I was initializing the form values. I was setting the default values to empty strings where I should have been initializing the dates to null. So I was doing this: replicantForm = this.fb.group({ name: ['', Validators.required],