<ng-container> vs <template>

Question

Edit 2 : It is NOT documented anymore !

Edit : Now it is documented

<ng-container> to the rescue

The Angular <ng-container> is a grouping element that doesn't interfere with styles or layout because Angular doesn't put it in the DOM.

(...)

The <ng-container> is a syntax element recognized by the Angular parser. It's not a directive, component, class, or interface. It's more like the curly braces in a JavaScript if-block:

  if (someCondition) {

      statement1; 
      statement2;
      statement3;
     }

Without those braces, JavaScript would only execute the first statement when you intend to conditionally execute all of them as a single block. The <ng-container> satisfies a similar need in Angular templates.

Original answer:

According to this pull request :

<ng-container> is a logical container that can be used to group nodes but is not rendered in the DOM tree as a node.

<ng-container> is rendered as an HTML comment.

so this angular template :

<div>
    <ng-container>foo</ng-container>
<div>

will produce this kind of output :

<div>
    <!--template bindings={}-->foo
<div>

So ng-container is useful when you want to conditionaly append a group of elements (ie using *ngIf="foo") in your application but don't want to wrap them with another element.

<div>
    <ng-container *ngIf="true">
        <h2>Title</h2>
        <div>Content</div>
    </ng-container>
</div>

will then produce :

<div>
    <h2>Title</h2>
    <div>Content</div>
</div>

The documentation (https://angular.io/guide/template-syntax#!#star-template) gives the following example. Say we have template code like this:

<hero-detail *ngIf="currentHero" [hero]="currentHero"></hero-detail>

Before it will be rendered, it will be "de-sugared". That is, the asterix notation will be transcribed to the notation:

<template [ngIf]="currentHero">
  <hero-detail [hero]="currentHero"></hero-detail>
</template>

If 'currentHero' is truthy this will be rendered as

<hero-detail> [...] </hero-detail>

But what if you want an conditional output like this:

<h1>Title</h1><br>
<p>text</p>

.. and you don't want the output be wrapped in a container.

You could write the de-sugared version directly like so:

<template [ngIf]="showContent">
  <h1>Title</h1>
  <p>text</p><br>
</template>

And this will work fine. However, now we need ngIf to have brackets [] instead of an asterix *, and this is confusing (https://github.com/angular/angular.io/issues/2303)

For that reason a different notation was created, like so:

<ng-container *ngIf="showContent"><br>
  <h1>Title</h1><br>
  <p>text</p><br>
</ng-container>

Both versions will produce the same results (only the h1 and p tag will be rendered). The second one is preferred because you can use *ngIf like always.