ng serve deletes /dist directory

[luke88jones]

Hello,

I believe there is an issue with the current configuration when running npm run start. A recent change to ng serve made it delete the ./dist directory. This is now causing the server to fail to start as its failing to locate the www.js file.

This is occurring on Windows

[stephenlane]

I get similar issue, just keep running the npm run start command and it will eventually work :)

[avbentem]

Just for future reference: deleting the dist folder is done since Angular CLI's angular/angular-cli#4293

[avbentem]

It seems that just changing the order in concurrently indeed lowers the chances of this happening, but does not always fix it.

However, since 1.1.0-rc.0 ng serve also supports --delete-output-path=false, which suppresses deletion of dist:

"start": "concurrently --kill-others \"ng serve --delete-output-path=false --aot=true --progress=false --proxy-config proxy.conf.json\" \"npm run _server:run\""

Alternatively, to get some implicit documentation, one could use some verbose --output-path=dummy-to-preserve-dist-folder on the command line of ng serve, which will then delete the ./dummy-to-preserve-dist-folder folder if that would exist, but above all leave dist alone.

Both tested on OS X.

As an aside, instead of calling tsc twice and using concurrently in:

"_server:run": "tsc -p ./server && concurrently \"tsc -w -p ./server\" \"nodemon dist/server/bin/www.js\" "

...I am using https://www.npmjs.com/package/tsc-watch The above makes tsc -w always trigger yet another compilation, which makes nodemon log [nodemon] restarting due to changes... a few times upon starting. Using tsc-watch avoids that:

"_server:run": "tsc-watch -p ./server --onSuccess \"nodemon dist/server/bin/www.js\""

(Thanks for a nice starter!)