When to use npm start and when to use ng serve

Question

ng serve serves an Angular project via a development server    nbsp      npm start runs an arbitrary command specified in the package s  start    property of its  scripts  object  If no  start  property is specified   on the  scripts  object  it will run node server js    It seems like ng serve starts the embedded server whereas npm start starts the Node servers   Can someone throw some light on it

User · Accepted Answer

npm start will run whatever you have defined for the start command of the scripts object in your package json file   So if it looks like this    scripts        start    ng serve      Then npm start will run ng serve

User · Answer

From the document  npm-start    This runs an arbitrary command specified in the package s  start  property of its  scripts  object  If no  start  property is specified on the  scripts  object  it will run node server js   which means it will call the start scripts inside the package json   scripts      start    tsc  amp  amp  concurrently   npm run tsc w     npm run lite --baseDir   app --port 8001       lite    lite-server            ng serve   Provided by angular angular-cli to start angular2 apps which created by angular-cli  when you install angular-cli  it will create ng cmd under C  Users name AppData Roaming npm  for windows  and execute    dp0 node exe      dp0 node modules angular-cli bin ng      So using npm start you can make your own execution where is ng serve is only for angular-cli  See Also   What happens when you run ng serve

User · Answer

For a project that s using the CLI  you will usually use ng serve  In other cases you may want to use npm start  Here the detailed explanation   ng serve  Will serve a project that is  Angular CLI aware   i e  a project that has been created using the Angular CLI  particularly using   ng new app-name   So  if you ve scaffolded a project using the CLI  you ll probably want to use ng serve  npm start  This can be used in the case of a project that is not Angular CLI aware  or it can simply be used to run  ng serve  for a project that s Angular CLI aware   As the other answers state  this is an npm command that will run the npm command s  from the package json that have the identifier  start   and it doesn t just have to run  ng serve   It s possible to have something like the following in the package json       scripts           build watch    tsc -p src  -w         serve    lite-server -c bs-config json         start    concurrently   npm run build watch     npm run serve                       devDependencies           concurrently     3 2 0         lite-server     2 2 2     In this case   npm start  will result in the following commands to be run   concurrently  npm run build watch   npm run serve    This will concurrently  run the TypeScript compiler  watching for code changes   and run the Node lite-server  which users BrowserSync

User · Answer

If you want to run angular app ported from another machine without ng command then edit package json as follows   scripts          ng    ng        start    node node modules  bin ng serve        build    node node modules  bin ng build        test    node node modules  bin ng test        lint    node node modules  bin ng lint        e2e    node node modules  bin ng e2e        Finally run usual npm start command to start build server

User · Answer

Best answer is great  short and on point  but I would like to put my pennyworth  Basically npm start and ng serve can be used interchangeably in Angular projects as long as you do not want the command to do additional stuff  Let me elaborate on this one  For example you may want to configure your proxy in package json start script like this   quot start quot    quot ng serve --proxy-config proxy config json quot   Obviously sole use of ng serve will not be enough  Another instance is when instead of using the defaults you need to use some additional options ad hoc like define the temporary port  ng serve --port 4444 Some parameters are only available to ng serve  others to npm start  Notice that port option works for both  so in that case it is up to your taste  again

User · Answer

There are more than that  The executed executables are different   npm run start   will run your projects local executable which is located in your node modules  bin   ng serve   will run another executable which is global   It means if you clone and install an Angular project which is created with angular-cli version 5 and your global cli version is 7  then you may have problems with ng build

[angular] When to use 'npm start' and when to use 'ng serve'?

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