Add Universal support

[mrjmd]

https://medium.com/@evertonrobertoauler/angular-4-universal-app-with-angular-cli-db8b53bba07d

[mrjmd]

Just for anyone who stumbles across this issue, this is still on our roadmap but is probably not going to land any time soon. Upon further research the method in the Medium article above is not really the best approach, and you end up not having some of the best features of both the CLI and Universal with that approach.

The Angular team is still working on adding Universal support to the CLI, but it sounds like it's a relatively high-effort task that may take a while. In the meantime, our best option may be to have a Universal branch of this project where we ng eject from the CLI and then customize our webpack config manually.

[joaogarin]

I agree with having a universal branch on the repo. but its something we can do once we feel the app is sort of ready for use. I think it can be accomplished easily so no point really in creating in now and having to do some maybe hard rebases to keep it in sync while we actively change the solution drastically..But definitely want to point out the is a super priority issue for us.

[mrjmd]

There is some progress being made on CLI integration, an early (alpha / experimental / branch) version of it may land as soon as next week in time for the talk about Angular on the Server at next week's Node Summit.

[joaogarin]

thats great news ! 🎉

[mrjmd]

Experimental CLI / Universal support has landed: https://twitter.com/hanslatwork/status/888527770925506560

[mrjmd]

Big news on this one, some new documentation and a new post on Medium have opened the possibilities up here.

We've got a work in progress branch / PR at #73.

[mrjmd]

I think our blocker soon is going to be hosting. I've done a little bit of digging into how Universal would work on Firebase, and there is some possibility of using Cloud Functions, but I haven't found any good guides.

[mrjmd]

Next update re: cloud functions, here's an example using Universal with Firebase Cloud Functions:

https://github.com/StephenFluin/angular-on-the-server