Serving Single Page Application (Angular) using Spring Backend

Single Page Applications (SPAs) have become increasingly popular in the development of web applications. They provide a seamless and interactive user experience by loading the entire application on a single page, and updating the content dynamically as the user interacts with it. Angular, a popular front-end framework, is often used to build SPAs. However, in order to serve the Angular application, you need a backend to handle the API calls and serve the static files.

Spring, a powerful and flexible Java framework, is commonly used to build the backend for web applications. In this article, we will discuss how to serve a single page application built with Angular using a Spring backend.

Setting up the Angular Application

First, you need to build the Angular application. If you haven’t already done so, create a new Angular project using the Angular CLI:


ng new my-angular-app


After building your Angular application, you will have a dist folder containing the compiled and minified files for your application. These are the files that need to be served by the backend.

Creating the Spring Backend

Next, you need to create the Spring backend. You can use Spring Boot to quickly set up a new project. Start by adding the necessary dependencies for serving static content and handling API requests:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
</dependency>

Once you have set up your Spring project, you can create a REST controller to handle API requests and serve the static files:

@RestController
public class SpaController {

    @RequestMapping(value = "/{[path:[^.]*}")
    public String redirect() {
        return "forward:/";
    }
}

This controller will redirect all requests to the root path, which is where the Angular application will be served.

Configuring the Spring Backend

Finally, you need to configure the Spring backend to serve the static files from the Angular application. This can be done by adding the following configuration to your application.properties file:

spring.resources.static-locations=classpath:/META-INF/resources/,classpath:/resources/,classpath:/static/,classpath:/public/

With this configuration, Spring will serve the static files from the specified locations, including the dist folder of your Angular application.

Conclusion

By following these steps, you can easily serve a single page application built with Angular using a Spring backend. This setup allows you to take advantage of the powerful features of Angular for building the front-end, while leveraging the robustness and flexibility of Spring for the backend. This combination provides a great platform for building modern web applications.