Implementing a Web Server

Now that both our applications can be built, we can move on to creating a simple server to host our applications.

In order to do this, we will create a simple Node.js server based on Express.js.

We will define our server in a TypeScript file called server.ts and run this file using the ts-node binary that we will install.

Note

The current implementation of Angular Universal depends on Node.js as it is implemented in JavaScript.

It is possible to run Angular Universal apps using other servers, such as ASP.NET, although under the hood the ASP.NET server will invoke a Node.js process to handle the Angular Universal part.

An example repository of how to run Angular Universal can be found here: https://github.com/MarkPieszak/aspnetcore-angular2-universal.

Installing Server Dependencies

We will install the ts-node binary that we will use to execute our server file. Additionally, we will install the rendering engine that will be used by Express.js to load our Angular Universal...