Angular 2 + angular-cli + Laravel 5.3 - php

Question

Using latest angular-cli, I created new project and everything works fine. Next, I tried to integrate it in Laravel 5.3. I have this project working with systemjs, but I want to switch to webpack and to take advantage of angular-cli.
Problem is that in angular-cli.json I can't specify that index is index.php, it only accepts HTML.
Basically, I can't start the Angular application at all with this setup.
How can I overcome this?

Answer 1

In the end I separated Laravel and Angular 2, as Cristian Sepulveda wrote in the comment. This is the recommended approach anyway.
I make API with Laravel and use it with Angular 2.

Answer 2

In my case I serve the angular app from laravel. I still use webpack to build my assets but have a gulp task which copies the angular index.html to be index.blade.php of which the laravel app serves.
I also use gulp to copy the built files from /dist to /public

Answer 3

I had the same problem and what I found is this related issue in their GitHub issues:
The output folder will always be entirely replaced. You can use the public/ folder to have your index.php which will be copied to your output folder, or output the app to a separate folder and copy the files yourself.
This is by design and will not change. This is a build output folder, not a deploy folder. You should separate those two steps.
So, you can't really achieve what you exactly want, but this is the only workaround I found.

Answer 4

I found only one solution for me.
create build for client side code by ng build --prod
Using gulp copy generated files into Laravel public dir gulp copy (here you can check if old build files exists remove them)
Using gulp-ingect plugin inject copied files into layout gulp inject
-- This can be used in CI and done with automation tools. In result we have inline.js and three *.**.bundle.js files injected. In same main layout i have statically add <base href="/example"> (you can use any defined in Laravel routes root path here) and inside template file which loaded from this path (in my case 'example.blade.php') add angular 2 root element <st-example>Loading...</st-example>
-- By this set up you have root Laravel layout which have inside required by angular 2 root url href and injected scripts files from build. And your template file for current route have root element inside (it included to main layout by simple blade yeild('content')).
P.S. also you must notice that if you are using some http requests in angular 2, after you integrate it into Laravel project this will add csrf protection middleware to each request... And if you have some new errors in requests which work previously just check headers.

Answer 5

Since angular-cli doesn’t allow you to specify index.php, let it be, simply specify index.html then there…
And add an appropriate route into Laravel routing. Like this one, for instance:
Route::any('{path?}', function () {
return File::get(public_path() . '/index.html');
})->where("path", ".+");
Btw, it’s simply a trap for any unknown routes… But I think you get an idea.