An app shell lets Universal render a portion of your application via a route at build time. This gives users a meaningful first paint of your application that appears quickly because the browser can simply render the HTML without the need to initialize any JavaScript.
Use this command with a routing app that is accompanied by a Universal server-side app.
To create an app shell, use the following command.
ng generate app-shell --client-project my-app --universal-project server-app
my-app is the name of your client applicationserver-app is the name of the Universal (server) applicationThe command adds two new architect build targets to your angular.json configuration file (along with a few other changes).
"server": { "builder": "@angular-devkit/build-angular:server", "options": {
"outputPath": "dist/my-app-server",
"main": "src/main.server.ts",
"tsConfig": "src/tsconfig.server.json"
} }, "app-shell": { "builder": "@angular-devkit/build-angular:app-shell", "options": {
"browserTarget": "my-app:build",
"serverTarget": "my-app:server",
"route": "shell"
} }
To verify the that the app has been built with the default shell content:
ng run my-app:app-shell
</code-example>
dist/app-shell/index.html in your browser.The default text "app-shell works!" verifies that the app-shell route was rendered as part of the output.