Can't change the base folder for lite-server in Angular 2 application

Question

I am going through the 5 minute quickstart of Angular 2. However, my application resides in src/ folder instead of at the root of my repository, and when I run npm start the application is trying to find an index.html file at the root. I read up on lite-server and documentation shows that it uses BrowserSync and I can reconfigure BrowserSync with a bs-config.json in my repository. I did that and this is what my config looks like:

{
  "port": 8123,
  "server": { "baseDir": "./src" }
}

According to the log it's using the specified config:

[1] > [email protected] lite E:\GitHub\todo-app-angular2
[1] > lite-server "./bs-config.json"

I also tried an override through bs-config.js

module.exports = {
  port: 8123,
  server: {
    baseDir: "./src"
  }
};

However the Angular application is still opened on port 3000 and it's disregarding the baseDir defined in the config. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

You should use a file called bs-config.js (instead of a bs-config.json one) since lite-server tries to load a module using the require function. The configuration should be a valid Node module:

module.exports = {
  "port": 8123,
  "server": { "baseDir": "./src" }
};

See this line in the source code: https://github.com/johnpapa/lite-server/blob/master/lib/lite-server.js#L20.

This file by default is loaded from the user's project folder.

Edit

After digging a bit more, the first part of my answer relies on the code from github but not the one actually installed using npm install (version 1.3.4)

There are two options in this case:

• port
• baseDir

Using this command will fix your problem:

$ lite-server --baseDir ./src --port 3333

Hope it helps you, Thierry

Answer 2

The answer from Thierry Templier is not quite correct (anymore), you can use either the bs-config.json or bs-config.js configuration to adjust your browser-sync configuration. This is what I came up initially for the angular2 quick start example with JIT(Just-In-Time) and AOT(Ahead-Of-Time) compilation support (bs-config.json)

{
  "port": 8000,
  "server": ["app", "."]
}

to host the project from multiple directories.

However, I did not like this solution because by overwriting the server section in the json file, the default middleware configuration was overwritten at the same time.

Therefore I ended with the following approach, I took the default lite-server's config-defaults.js files and modified it instead (bs-config.js):

'use strict';
var fallback = require('connect-history-api-fallback');
var log = require('connect-logger');
/*
 | For up-to-date information about the options:
 |   http://www.browsersync.io/docs/options/
 */
module.exports = {
  port: 8000,
  injectChanges: false, // workaround for Angular 2 styleUrls loading
  filters: ['./**/*.{html,htm,css,js}'],
  watchOptions: {
    ignored: 'node_modules'
  },
  server: ['./', 'app'],
  middleware: [
    log({ format: '%date %status %method %url' }),
    fallback({
        index: '/index.html',
        htmlAcceptHeaders: ['text/html', 'application/xhtml+xml'] // systemjs workaround
    })
  ]
};