Create Multiple Angular Apps in One Project

In this guide, we will show you how to create and organize multiple apps in one Project or Workspace. The Angular CLI since version 6 allows us to create a multi-project workspace to manage multiple Angular apps. We do that first by creating an empty workspace. A Workspace is a collection of Angular apps, projects, or libraries. Later we can add multiple projects to the workspace.

Advantages

There are several advantages of having Multiple Angular Apps in One Project.

1. One is you do not have to run the time consuming npm install for every app.
2. The node_modules folder is shared with all the other apps saving disk space.
3. All the apps can be updated to the next version easily.
4. A single source-control repository (such as git).

Create the Empty Workspace

We create a new app using the ng new <new> Angular CLI command. It creates and workspace with an initial Angular app with the name <new> in the src folder. The createApplication="false" option introduced in Angular 7 now stops the creation of the initial app. It only creates the workspace

The above command creates a folder with the name MultipleApps and configures the workspace. It does not create any apps.

Add a new Project to the Workspace

Now, to create a new app under the workspace, we need to use the ng generate application command The first app created is marked as the default app.

If you use the ng new inside the workspace, it will throw the following error.

The new command requires to be run outside of a project, but a project definition was found at “D:\MultipleApps\angular.json”

Run the App

There are three ways in which you can run the app.

• Use the ng serve gettingStarted
• Use the --project flag ng serve --project="gettingStarted"
• Open the angular.json and locate the defaultProject and change the name of the project to gettingStarted and run ng serve

Add Another Project to the workspace

To create another app, run the ng generate application again.

Run the App

And use the ng serve to run it

Building the App for Production

Use ng build to build the app with --project option.

Folder Structure

The folder structure is similar to the Single App workspace, except for the following

projects folder

The src folder is gone. Instead, we have a projects folder. Each app we create gets its folder under the projects folder.

dist folder

The dist folder now has a folder for each of the new apps.

Angular.json

The angular.json, contains the configuration settings for the workspace. Here is the shortened version of Angular.json for the above code.

newProjectRoot: node points to the location of the projects folder.

projects: contain a section for each app in the workspace. Each section contains configuration for the compiler.

defaultProject: The default project used, when you run the ng serve, ng build etc.

References

1. Angular File structure
2. Check the Angular CLI Version

Source Code

https://github.com/tekTutorialsHub/Angular-MultipleApps

Summary

In this guide, we learned how to organize multiple apps in one single workspace/Project in Angular.