UPGRADE-GUIDE.md

Upgrading from Angular2-Universal (2.x) to Angular v4 / platform-server

In general, you're going to want to make sure you remove all references of angular2-universal from your project. If you're using isBrowser / isNode, use instead isPlatformBrowser() which you'll find information on here.

Install platform-server into your application (and its dependency @angular/animations (this is due to NoOpAnimationsModule being needed for the Server))

npm i --S @angular/platform-server @angular/animations

As for your individual root files, there actually aren't many changes you'll need to do!

Server.ts

When it comes the underlying express-engine, things will remain fairly similar except that now, you're going to be instead doing import { ngExpressEngine } from '@nguniversal/express-engine'; More detailed information on the express-engine here

Make sure you remove angular2-universal-polyfills and any __workaround.ts files you may have been using (if you were using Universal with Angular > 2.1+). As for polyfills on the server, you'll instead need the following:

import 'zone.js/dist/zone-node';
import 'reflect-metadata';

As for your main NgModule's, one major thing you'll notice is that we no longer use UniversalModule.

Browser-app.module.ts

So UniversalModule has now been replaced with BrowserModule, and notice we pass in an appId that we want to make sure is the same name as the one included on the app.server.ts file.

import { BrowserModule } from '@angular/platform-browser';

@NgModule({
	bootstrap: [ AppComponent ],
	imports: [
    BrowserModule.withServerTransition({ 
      appId: 'my-app-id' // <-- 
    }),
    AppModule
	]
})
export class BrowserAppModule {}

Server-app.module.ts

Notice here we import not only a BrowserModule, but a ServerModule as well.

import { BrowserModule } from '@angular/platform-browser';
import { ServerModule } from '@angular/platform-server';

@NgModule({
  bootstrap: [AppComponent],
  imports: [
    BrowserModule.withServerTransition({
      appId: 'my-app-id' // <-- same name
    }),
    ServerModule, // <--
    AppModule
  ]
})
export class ServerAppModule { }

Angular 4 / platform-server example

An official starter can be found at angular/universal-starter