App shell pattern

The App shell pattern is a way to render a portion of your application using a route at build time. It can improve the user experience by quickly launching a static rendered page (a skeleton common to all pages) while the browser downloads the full client version and switches to it automatically after the code loads.

This gives users a meaningful first paint of your application that appears quickly because the browser can render the HTML and CSS without the need to initialize any JavaScript.

Do this with the following Angular CLI command:

ng new my-app

For an existing application, you have to manually add the Router and defining a <router-outlet> within your application.

Use the Angular CLI to automatically create the application shell.

ng generate app-shell

For more information about this command, see App shell command.

The command updates the application code and adds extra files to the project structure.

src
├── app
│ ├── app.config.server.ts # server application configuration
│ └── app-shell # app-shell component
│   ├── app-shell.component.html
│   ├── app-shell.component.scss
│   ├── app-shell.component.spec.ts
│   └── app-shell.component.ts
└── main.server.ts # main server application bootstrapping

ng build --configuration=development

Or to use the production configuration.

ng build

To verify the build output, open <code class="no-auto-link">dist/my-app/browser/index.html</code>. Look for default text app-shell works! to show that the application shell route was rendered as part of the output.