Without the Boilerplate

Without the Boilerplate

It's very easy to setup a bare-bones Angel server.

Any Dart project needs a project file, called pubspec.yaml. This file almost always contains a dependencies section, where you will install the Angel framework libraries. In most cases, you will want to import package:angel_common, which contains all of the functionality you need to build an Angel application. However, if you only want the HTTP server, install package:angel_framework instead. package:angel_common bundles package:angel_framework, along with other core packages (see here).

dependencies:
    angel_common: ^1.0.0-beta

Next, run pub get on the command line, or in your IDE if it has Dart support. This will install the framework and all of its dependencies.

Next, create a file, bin/server.dart. Put this code in it:

import 'dart:io';
import 'package:angel_common/angel_common.dart';

main() async {
  Angel app = new Angel();

  app.get("/", "Hello, world!");

  var server = await app.startServer();
  print("Angel server listening on port ${server.port}");
}

The specifics are not that important, but there are three important calls here:

1. Angel app = new Angel() - The base Angel server is a simple class, and we need an instance of it to run our server.
2. app.get("/", "Hello, world!"); - This is a route, and tells our server to respond to all GET requests at our server root with "Hello, world!". The response will automatically be encoded as JSON.
3. await app.startServer(...) - This asynchronous call is what actually starts the server listening.

You might consider wrapping this in a call to runZoned, so your server does not crash on errors.

That's it! Your server is ready to serve requests. You can easily start it from the command line like this:

dart bin/server.dart