Introduction to Guide to Angular Universal

Angular Universal and the Era of Single-Page Applications

This lesson answers the questions "What do I need to accomplish the course?" "What software is needed?" "What should I know about Angular and other technologies?" "What should I do to accomplish the course offline?"

Course prerequisites

Introduction

In this course module, you will build a production-ready Angular application. It will consist of a list of products with pictures, descriptions, and prices. Each product will have a dedicated landing page. You will also develop the functionality of adding products to a list of favorites and displaying that list. You will build a back-end and API to feed your application with data. The data will be retrieved from MongoDB provisioned in your Heroku application.

How Does Angular Work with Heroku and MongoDB?

Most projects start from scratch. This one is not an exception. In this lesson you will initialize the Angular application using CLI, include the Cascading StyleSheet, set up routing and basic components.

How to Install Angular From the CLI and Add Bootstrap CSS

In this lesson you will prepare the application backend an entry gate for communicating with persistance layer and hosting Angular application bundle.

How to Build and Run an Angular Backend to Test Locally

Every application needs a persistence layer. This lesson will show you how to enroll for free Atlas cloud MongoDB instance. You will also feed your database with data.

How to Install MongoDB Locally and Import JSON Data

Once the database is set up and ready, you need to establish a connection with it. That's what you're going to do in this part of the course. Apart of that you will create backend API to get list of products and their descriptions.

How to Build a MongoDB REST API to Fetch Data

We're building software for people, and we need to give them a way to communicate with it. This lesson will show you how to prepare an API for user interaction like loging in and adding products to list of favorites. Moreover you will be introduced to the security essentials like cookies encryption and password hashing.

Build MongoDB API With Encryption for PII Data and Auth

When the backend is ready, it's time for frontend. In this lesson you will integrate user API with Angular. You will implement the user authentication flow.

How to Add User Authentication to Angular With MongoDB API

Our application would be nothing without the data. In this course part you will display products images, description and prices in your Angular application.

How to Fetch Data From MongoDB and Display it in Angular

Every journey has some end. At the end of software development is production. It's time to deploy your application to Heroku and test with multiple tools how it performs.

How to Deploy an Angular App and Watch Performance

Building the app

In the previous module, you've built a fully functional production-ready application. Unfortunately, like other single-page applications, this application has its weaknesses. In this module, you will learn how to address one of them and render HTML content on the server.

Angular Universal

The easiest way to enhance your Angular project with new functionalities is to use Schematics - a set of instruction for CLI on how to change the project and install new dependencies. Let's do that with Angular Universal and review what Schematics did for us.

Server-Side Rendering With Angular Universal Schematics

Once the application is said to be SEO friendly and performance optimized by schemtaics - let's check that in battlefield. In this lesson you will deploy your project to Heroku and measure its performance.

How to Measure Performance - Angular vs Angular Universal

Unfortunately, schematics are not a magic wand and they won't solve all of your problems. Sometimes your project needs to be adjusted to do not break Server-Side Rendering process. Here's what might go wrong, and how to address that.

How to Add Internationalization to Angular With i18n

In this lesson, you will add even more for SEO. Your application deserves robots.txt and proper sitemap.

How to Add Sitemap.xml and Robots.txt to an Angular App

Next step in SEO is to set up meta-tags. If you want to know how to do it in Angular, this lesson will help you to find the answer.

How to Optimize Angular SEO With Title and Meta Tags

In this lesson, you can see how Angular Universal helps when your user's browser doesn't support JavaScript

Noscript

Applying Angular Universal

In this course module, you will learn how to pass objects and function references from Node.js to Angular Universal sandbox. You will build a service that will be used to connect with MongoDB and perform queries. You will also gain knowledge on how to prepare a server-equivalent of services used in browser-side Angular; and how to improve your application performance thanks to them. You will also make your application fully functional for users with disabled JavaScript.

Retrieve MongoDB Data in Angular Universal With Secrets

One of possible improvements is to perform queries against MongoDB directly from Angular Universal. In this lesson you will create a service which does this job.

How to Query MongoDB from Angular Universal

Once your MongoService is in place, you need to prepare a server-equivalent of ProductsService. This service will query MongoService for products list and descriptions and embed those in the HTML rendered by Angular Universal.

How to Build Server-Specific Services in Angular Universal

Next step is to create a server-equivalent of service responsible for user interactions. This lesson will show you how to read HTTP requests in Angular, get cookies from it and decrypt them.

How to Read HTTP Requests With Cookies in Angular

Once you know how to read cookies in the Angular Universal app, it's time to learn how to set them up. In this lesson, you will make your application fully functional for users whose browser doesn't support JavaScript at all.

How to Make Angular Functional With JavaScript Disabled

Browser vs. Server

Say Hello to TransferState, a key-value registry that is passed along with the application bundle, from the server-side angular to the browser-side part of the application. In this lesson you will learn how frontend can get to know what backend has already do (ie retrieving data from DB); thanks to that you can avoid repeating those steps and offload your application backend.

Send Server Data to Client With Angular TransferState

Next step is to get know a TransferHttpCacheModule, which provides the TransferState functionality "out of the box" for the HTTP calls.

Perform Angular HTTP Calls With TransferHttpCacheModule

Long running API calls can affect your application rendering time, that might lead to the SEO disaster. In this lesson you will learn how you can protect your application against such situation.

How to Handle Slow API Calls in Angular

In this module, you've learned how to pass data between the server and the browser using the `TransferState` registry. You've also introduced `TransferHttpCacheModule` that passes data obtained via HTTP during server-side rendering to the browser. You've learned how to abandon long-running REST API calls that affect rendering performance.

Summary

Transfering data between server and browser

Wanna be a performance beast? It's time to cache! In this module, you will use the Redis database to implement server-side caching and improve Time To First Byte. From now on, only selected requests will trigger the rendering process. The rendered output will be kept in Redis for a specified period of time. Subsequent requests will be served with data retrieved from Redis.

Module Overview

First things first. Let's install the Redis DB on your machine and provision it in the Heroku environment.

How to Install Redis CLI on Windows, Mac, and Heroku

In this lesson you will create a Node.JS middle-ware, that will be responsible for caching rendered views inside Redis database.

How to Cache Angular With Redis Node.js Middleware

Faster! Faster! Faster! In this lesson you will enable gzip compression, defer the CSS, lazy-load images and more. All to make it faster!

5 Angular Performance Optimization Tips

Caching with Redis

How to verify your application behavior in different environments? In this lesson you will get to know how you can stub the PLATFORM_ID injection token and HTTP request, for tests purpose.

How to Mock PLATFORM_ID Value for Angular Unit Testing

Next step is to simulate a long-running API and verify how server-side Angular deals with it. This lesson will demonstrate you how to do that.

How to Unit Test Slow API Calls in Angular

Last but not least of your unit tests, should be to verify the server-specific services. In this lesson you will learn how to enforce Karma to run tests against code that includes server-specific objects and libraries.

How to Unit Test Server-Side Services in Angular Karma

In this lesson you will learn how you can verify the TransferState registry content in your E2E tests.

Build Angular End-to-End Unit Tests With TransferState

This lesson is going to show you how to mock your data-source - MongoDB - for the E2E tests purpose. Thanks to using mongo-unit you will be able to perform actions that changes data in your DB, during E2E testing.

How to Mock MongDB for Angular End-to-End Unit Tests

Testing

In this module, you'll learn how to adjust the Angular application to be pre-renderable. Such prepared application can be deployed on static hosting like GitHub pages and still be SEO friendly! You will feed your application with data retrieved from MongoDB during the prerendering process.

Prerendering in Angular

What is prerendering and how Angular Universal supports it? This lesson will answer that questio and show you what steps you need to take, to make your application prerenderable.

How to Resolve Angular Prerendering Issues

Prerendering

That was a bumpy ride, but definetely worth it. In this lesson we will summarize what you've learned so far and how ng --prod differentiate from Universal and Prerendered application.

Angular --prod Universal Versus Prerender

angular

angular-cli

In this course, we'll create a complete Angular application that is Server-Side-Rendered with Angular Universal.

The application will be optimized for the best possible performance and will be tuned for real-world production use. For example, we'll use Redis for server-side caching, create protected routes, and get great SEO benefits with a snappy user experience.

![](https://s3.amazonaws.com/assets.fullstack.io/n/20201111013120117_features%402x.png)

This course is 40+ lessons where we walk through a step-by-step tutorial to optimize an Angular app from a [Lighthouse score](https://web.dev/performance-scoring/) of 66 (the default) to a blazing-fast score of 95 (!)

The problem with "normal" Angular apps is that they don't run until our user has downloaded the entire application - but with SSR, we'll _render our Angular app on the server_.

**The result is that your app will load super-fast, you'll improve your SEO, you will delight your users.**

Along the way, we'll learn production deployment techniques like:

* how to use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for global performance and 
* how to deploy to Heroku and retrieve data from a MongoDB database
* How to measure and improve metrics like time-to-first-byte and time to first-contentful-paint
* How to add data like internationalization with SSR
* How to manage **security** and **secrets** in your SSR build
* How **fetch server-side queries from the database**
* How to use `TransferState` to eliminate duplicate client-side queries
* How to _test_ server-side rendered apps
* How to pre-render static pages

By the end of this course you'll understand how to create Angular apps with real-world, production-level performance.

Master Production-Ready SSR and Deployments with Angular

In this course I'll show you how to enhance existing Angular application with Angular Universal, how to optimize its performance and what are Server-Side Rendering best practices. You'll see how to improve PageSpeed Insights score from 66 to 95 points!

The newline Guide to Angular Universal

How to make SEO friendly Angular application

What problems Angular Universal can solve

How to integrate Angular Universal application with MongoDB and Redis cache

Preparing server-specific Angular services and logic paths in the server and browser common code

How to create transfer data between server and browser using TransferState

Importance of optimizing server-side REST calls

How to manipulatie Angular application <title> and <meta> tags

How to Unit test and e2e test Angular Universal application

How to prepare your application for prerendering

Single-page applications (SPA) have quickly become a web standard. Almost every website is SPA these days. They give users a native-like app experience with smooth transitions, you don't need to bother with preparing your application for different browsers (frameworks take care of that), and much more. However, they have at least one big pitfall: they are rendered in the browser rather than on the server. To understand the problem, consider the browser's simplified workflow. The browser:

As you can see, the moment when your Angular application is bootstrapped is at the very end of the workflow. That's why it takes so long to render the first contentful paint.

SPAs have one more pitfall. Because content is rendered in the browser, the 

 file shipped to the end user has no content. What if your end user is a web crawler?

In this course, you will learn how to address these pitfalls by bootstrapping your Angular application in Node.js and serving the end user's browser with fully rendered HTML views. You will learn how to improve your overall application performance and boost its Google 

In the first course module you will build a regular Angular application served from the Heroku. Such application scores around 60-70 points in the PageSpeed Insights audit:

Moreover, it takes a little bit to ship the first byte (about 70ms):

At the very end of this course, your application will score over 90 points:

In addition to learning to apply Angular Universal in existing applications, you will learn best practices and techniques such as:

During this course you will build an Angular application that:

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title: Angular Universal and the Era of Single-Page Applications
description: Introduction to Guide to Angular Universal
role: "INTRODUCTION"
isPublicLesson: true
---

# The Era of Single-Page Applications

Single-page applications (SPA) have quickly become a web standard. Almost every website is SPA these days. They give users a native-like app experience with smooth transitions, you don't need to bother with preparing your application for different browsers (frameworks take care of that), and much more. However, they have at least one big pitfall: they are rendered in the browser rather than on the server. To understand the problem, consider the browser's simplified workflow. The browser:

-   Establishes a connection with the server (queries DNS, sets up an SSL connection, etc.) and requests data.
-   Retrieves the data.
-   Renders HTML.
-   Applies CSS.
-   Bootstraps JavaScript.

As you can see, the moment when your Angular application is bootstrapped is at the very end of the workflow. That's why it takes so long to render the first contentful paint.

SPAs have one more pitfall. Because content is rendered in the browser, the `index.html` file shipped to the end user has no content. What if your end user is a web crawler?

## Guide to Angular Universal

In this course, you will learn how to address these pitfalls by bootstrapping your Angular application in Node.js and serving the end user's browser with fully rendered HTML views. You will learn how to improve your overall application performance and boost its Google [PageSpeed Insights](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights) score from 66 to 95 points!.

In the first course module you will build a regular Angular application served from the Heroku. Such application scores around 60-70 points in the PageSpeed Insights audit:

![](https://d2uusema5elisf.cloudfront.net/courses/newline-guide-to-angular-universal/module_01/lesson_01.01/public/assets/pagespeed_before.jpg)

Moreover, it takes a little bit to ship the first byte (about 70ms):

![](https://d2uusema5elisf.cloudfront.net/courses/newline-guide-to-angular-universal/module_01/lesson_01.01/public/assets/ttfb_before.jpg)

At the very end of this course, your application will score over 90 points:

![](https://d2uusema5elisf.cloudfront.net/courses/newline-guide-to-angular-universal/module_01/lesson_01.01/public/assets/pagespeed.jpg)

And TTFB will be decreased to 38ms:

![](https://d2uusema5elisf.cloudfront.net/courses/newline-guide-to-angular-universal/module_01/lesson_01.01/public/assets/ttfb.jpg)

In addition to learning to apply Angular Universal in existing applications, you will learn best practices and techniques such as:

-   Preparing separate logic paths in your application for browser and server runtimes.
-   Preparing server-specific Angular services.
-   Working with HTTP requests in Angular.
-   Transferring data between the server and the browser along with the application bundle.
-   Abandoning long-running API calls that affect server-side rendering performance.
-   Using Redis to cache rendered views on the server.
-   Testing server-side code.
-   Pre-rendering Angular applications to publish them using static hosting.

During this course you will build an Angular application that:

-   Responds to each HTTP request with fully rendered HTML.
-   Retrieves content from MongoDB.
-   Uses the `TransferState` registry to embed data retrieved during rendering into the application bundle and send it to the browser.
-   Contains routes that are only available to authenticated users.
-   Is fully functional also for users with disabled JavaScript.
-   Uses Redis to cache rendered views and ship them to the end user even faster.

You will learn how to:

-   Apply best performance tuning practices such as image lazy loading, deferring CSS, and using new image file formats: WebP and AVIF.
-   Enable gzip compression that improves your application's performance.
-   Use a CDN with your application and enable HTTP2 to ship your content even faster.
