How to Install Angular on Mac

Angular is an open-source, front-end web application development framework, it is TypeScript-based and led by the Angular Team at Google and by a community of individuals and corporations.

In this document, we will cover installation procedure of angular on mac operating system

Prerequisites

This guide assumes that you are using macOS. Before you begin, you should have a user account with installation privileges and should have unrestricted access to all mentioned web sites in this document.

Audience:

This document can be referred by anyone who wants to install latest nodejs on mac

System requirements

• macOS >= 10.10
• 4 GB RAM
• 10 GB free space

Installation Procedure

To install angular cli we need nodejs and npm. First let’s understand what these are and why we need them.

What is Nodejs and Why you need for angular development?

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript run-time environment that executes JavaScript code outside of a browser. Node.js lets developers use JavaScript to develop wide variety of applications like network applications, command line tools, web api, web applications. You need nodejs for dev tooling (like local web server with live reloading features) and dev experience, you do not need nodejs to run react in production.

What is npm and Why you need for angular development?

Npm stands for node package manager, it is a dependency management tool for javascript applications. This tool will help to install the libraries and other tools to support angular development.

Let’s start with nodejs installation post completion on nodejs we will install angular cli and create new angular project

1.Download nodejs

• Visit nodejs download page here

• Click on macOS Installer to download the latest version of node installable package. 

2.Install nodejs

• Click on the download node-vxx.xx.xx.pkg ( for example node-v10.15.0.pkg) in previous step to start the installation which brings up below screen. Please click continue

• By clicking continue in previous step you will be asked to accept license, please click continue 

• Please accept the agreement by clicking Agree

• Click continue

• Click install, which would prompt you for the credentials

• Provide username and password and click Install Software

• On successful installation you will see the below screen which shows the summary of the installation.

To access the node and npm executable from terminal make sure /usr/local/bin is in your $PATH. You can verify that by running echo $PATH command in terminal

3.Testing Installation

• Open terminal and run below command to test node 

node -v

You should see an output like below (Note: Your version may vary depending on your date of installing as nodejs team make an aggressive release but make sure your node version is > v10.0.0)

• Open terminal and run below command to test npm

npm -v

You should see an output like below (Note: Your version may vary depending on your date of installing as nodejs team make an aggressive release but make sure your npm version Is  >5 )

Install angular cli

Setting up productive angular development environment would need to configure tools like typescript, webpack and other angular dependencies which are complex to configure for a newbie in angular world. There are several tools that help to alleviate this problem out of which angular cli is the easiest and finest tool with production grade configurations pre-built. Angular cli comes with wide range of commands that help manage the angular development, testing and build process

We will install angular cli using npm. On terminal run the install command shown below

npm install -g @angular/cli 

On successful installation you should see the output like above (note your angular/cli version may be different by the time you run this install command) 

Test @angular/cli

 To test the @angular/cli run ng version command

Congratulations, you have successfully installed @angular/cli

Running the first Hello World application

• Create angular application using ng new command as shown below

This command creates a new folder named hello-angular and creates all the files and setups the necessary libraries within this folder and makes the angular project ready to be executed without any additional configuration

• Once project is created change into project directory and run application using ng serve command as shown below

ng serve -o command starts webpack development server which in turn performs all the build process and opens a browser window and loads application url which runs at http://localhost:4200 by default.

On successful execution you should see the below output in browser

As discussed, angular cli comes with great tooling, one of the productive features is webpack hot reloading, which deploys the change on live and saves developer lot of time to redeploy and reload work.

Let’s open the project and make some changes to see the experience of this great feature. We will go through the project structure to understand the importance of the files and folders created

Open the project which was created in previous step in any JS editor, here you see the project is open in vscode editor. On to the left in explorer section you see file explorer which shows you several folders and files which were created by ng new command. Let’s walkthrough them

e2e: this folder contains end to end testing source and configuration code. If you wish to write end to end testing automation code, you efforts go into this folder

node_modules: This folder is managed by package manager (npm) and contains all the project library dependencies. Files in this folder should not be modified as the changes made are not guaranteed to be safe as updating/installing any other library can overwrite the changes made. 

src: This is the folder that contains all your development effort. As a angular developer you spent lot of time in this folder creating modules, components, services, directive etc.,
Other files that are outside src folder and configuration files for angular cli, editor, typescript, linting and npm

Now let’s get into src folder. Within this folder there are several other folders like 

app – this folder contains all your source code, and this is the place all your development effort goes

assets – contains the static asses to like images etc., 

environments – contains the per environment configuration file which holds the settings to be used for dev/test and prod environments

Other files are configuration files and settings.

Out all files main.ts is the starting file and the project code execution starts from this file.

Let's make a code change to the AppComponent, open app.component.html and make the changes as shown in below code 

Save the file and switch back to browser to see the changes deployed and loaded as discussed, this one of the features of angular cli tooling setup.  

 With new changes your browser window should look like below

Congrats!! You have setup an angular project 

Uninstall angular cli

• On command prompt run npm uninstall -g @angular/cli