Angular2 AOT with Lazy loading Can't resolve [path to lazy module].ngfactory.ts

Question

I am trying to convert an App that was already working with Lazy loaded modules into AOT. I am using the @ngtools/webpack toolkit to compile the AOT code, however I am getting into an error that Angular cant find the Lazy loaded module's code as it seems.

ERROR in ./src/ngfactory async
Module not found: Error: Can't resolve '/Library/WebServer/Documents/envato-teams/src/ngfactory/src/app/components/container/projects.ngfactory.ts' in '/Library/WebServer/Documents/envato-teams/src/ngfactory'
@ ./src/ngfactory async
@ ./~/@angular/core/src/linker/system_js_ng_module_factory_loader.js
@ ./src/ngfactory/src/app/app.module.ngfactory.ts
@ ./src/main.aot.ts
@ multi main

Worth mention in my app routes definition this project's module is loaded lazily :

{
  path: 'projects', loadChildren: './components/container/projects#ProjectModule'
},

This is how my setup looks like:

tsconfig :

...
"angularCompilerOptions": {
  "genDir": "./src/ngfactory",
  "entryModule": "src/app/app.module#AppModule"
}
...

Webpack :

new ngtools.AotPlugin({
    tsConfigPath: './tsconfig.aot.json',
}),

Main.aot.ts

/*
* Providers provided by Angular
*/
import { platformBrowser } from '@angular/platform-browser';
import { AppModuleNgFactory } from './ngfactory/src/app/app.module.ngfactory';

import { Servicesconfig } from './app/services/index';

platformBrowser().bootstrapModuleFactory(AppModuleNgFactory);

In webpack I am compiling ts files with @ngtools/Webpack by doing :

// Support for .ts files.
{
  test: /\.ts$/,
  loaders: ['@ngtools/webpack'],
  exclude: [/\.(spec|e2e)\.ts$/]
},

Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

I was struggling myself with AOT and Lazy loaded modules.

Choosing one or the other was not really an option for prod build.

Even tho I really needed those features together, I was not able to get them and had to give up. Until today !

angular-cli made a release two days ago : 1.0.0-beta.21 which supports AOT and Lazy loading !

In your angular-cli project :

npm cache clean  
npm install --save-dev angular-cli@latest  
ng init

Enjoy !

PS : Big thanks to angular-cli team which made an awesome work here ... !

EDIT :
I did some benchmarks :

+-----------------------+-------------+--------------+-----------+-------------+
|                       | Main bundle |   Chunk 0    | Scripting | First paint |
+-----------------------+-------------+--------------+-----------+-------------+
| ng serve              | 4.5 MB      | Not splitted | 6075 ms   | 5500+ ms    |
| ng serve --prod       | 334 KB      | Not splitted | 5587 ms   | 4750+ ms    |
| ng serve --aot        | 3.3 MB      | 326 KB       | 4011 ms   | 4400+ ms    |
| ng serve --prod --aot | 243 KB      | 18.1 Kb      | 3860 ms   | 4250+ ms    |
+-----------------------+-------------+--------------+-----------+-------------+

(results aren't super good because I have a lot of things opened and 3 monitors and my laptop is in pain ^__^).

Here's what we can remember from that :
- The --prod --aot build size is 27% smaller than --prod build
- The --prod --aot build is 31% faster when scripting than --prod build
- AOT is cool !
- There's probably a bug without aot flag because unless I missed something, I couldn't find the lazy loaded chunk I expected and I found the supposed lazy loaded code into the main bundle. I opened an issue on Github.