How to Deploy and Run an Angular-CLI to AWS EC2 with Jenkins

Question

Here's where I stand right now:

1. Angular2 codebase is currently in Bitbucket
2. Jenkins build is to bring in the codebase, run an "ng build" to get the /dist folder built correctly.
3. deploy only the /dist folder contents to the server

From here, I'm very confused as to what to do to actually run the front-end code. When doing local development, I simply do "ng serve" from the project root directory, and that handles everything. Is this still how I run the project from the server after moving the /dist artifacts over? Angular-CLI documentation is extremely lacking in this aspect, as the only given way to deploy code currently is to use github-pages, which is not something I want to have to do.

Anyone able to give me some guidance or documentation that helps me figure out what I'm trying to do?

Answer 1

Once you build the project, and copy the contents of the "dist" directory, you need a web server to server the index.html and the Angular2 JavaScript. If you are running a Windows instance on EC2, you need to install IIS. Or on Linux, Apache. You need to have those files in a directory accessible from the web server, and that's it. Running "ng serve" locally provides the functionality of a web server through NodeJs.