Use the Angular Package Format

[lazarljubenovic]

There's been some development in publishing libraries since our build system was last time revised. We now have an official document called Angular Package Format (APF), which describes the what and why.

As for how... There's been a lot of discussion everywhere. In the CLI repo, it started here and after more than a year continued here. Here, we have a very informant comment by Rob, which explains problems with packaging and why CLI cannot do it the way we create apps with it.

The important bit in the comment is angular-quickstart-lib repo by Filipe, Angular CLI core member which serves as an APF starter. There's a PR to make the readme of that repo an official Angular guide, but looks like it got stalled for a month now; so I'm not sure where we're at from the standpoint of "this is official and this is how it should be done" by the Angular core team.

There's also an ongoing attempt to create a CLI for creating libraries in APF, called ng-packagr, but it's rather new and not used much yet. So I'd rather use the aforementioned APF boilerplate as a reference point and re-organize the repo.

[sebholstein]

@lazarljubenovic 100% agree. I didn't know that there's a doc already. I created this issue #974 a while ago. This would also fix the several Universal issues.

[lazarljubenovic]

Merging such a change would pretty much break all pending PRs because everything would be moved around and renamed, so it might be a good idea to take a few weeks going through some larger PRs first?

[sebholstein]

@lazarljubenovic no, this should be independent from the code changes, as we have to change the structure of the package content but not the source code itself.

[nikolasleblanc]

Hey guys, I wrote this blog post about using ng-packagr to build out a component library using the CLI, https://medium.com/@ngl817/building-an-angular-4-component-library-with-the-angular-cli-and-ng-packagr-53b2ade0701e - having worked on a few component libraries myself in the last year and a half, this is by far the easiest process I've come across. Would recommend you check it out, and if you see holes in the process would very much appreciate feedback. Thanks.

[nasreddineskandrani]

how about this option ?
https://github.com/jvandemo/generator-angular2-library

[lpmusicon]

Hey, any update on this?

[nasreddineskandrani]

They have a lib part in case it can be usefull for you guys https://blog.nrwl.io/nrwl-nx-an-open-source-toolkit-for-enterprise-angular-applications-38698e94d65
Didn't try it my self yet.

[stale]

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