I know what you’re thinking. Another Angular Course? I promise this one is different!

In this course, we will not cover the absolute basics of Angular, because – let’s be honest – there are more than enough courses about the Angular basics out there.

Instead, we’ll focus on building a real-world web application with the tools Angular and Node.js provide.

We will build an SEO friendly blog, which means we’re going to use Angular Universal to build a server-side rendered front end.

In the back end, we’re going to use Node.js for the web service, we store our data in a MariaDB and to map our objects with the database, we’re going to use the object-relational mapping library Sequelize.

And finally, we publish the whole thing on a Windows Server with IISNode.

The web application itself will be a blog that could be extended to a big news or magazine web application.

We start with displaying some articles and later on we’ll build an administration dashboard with authentication (we’re using JSON Web Tokens to be more specific) and the option to create new articles, modify them, and so on.

Let’s have a deeper look at what you are going to learn in this course:

The Basic Blog

In this section, we will start with our Angular project and develop the blog, so that it will work offline – without any web service or database. In essence, you could already publish this blog if you want to add all your blog posts within your Angular app.

Meta & Open Graph Tags

As the title may already imply, here we will add meta tags and open graph tags. So the information that search engines and social media platforms need to find your blog and display your articles properly when they are shared.

Keep in mind though, that these tags won’t necessarily work if you stick with a client-side rendered Angular app. Google promised to be able to crawl client-side rendered Angular web applications, but by the experience of many blogs and developers, we are not there yet.

Apart from that, social media platforms still need proper source code or tags to scrape your site properly.

Angular Universal

A short but important section – we will implement server-side rendering (SSR) here. That’s what Angular Universal is all about. When you finished implementing server-side rendering, your tags will be available in the source of your blog and your pages will also render much faster.

Back end with Node.js

It’s time for the backend. We’ll create a new project, the web service with Node.js. Now the articles will come from the web service.

Database & ORM with MariaDB & Sequelize

We expand the web service and finally connect our web application with a database so that the articles are now stored in a MariaDB. Additionally, we will use Sequelize for the object relational mapping between our models and the database tables.

Administration Dashboard

In essence, the blog works with all layers. We have the client, the web service and the database. But adding new articles and modifying them is a bit cumbersome. So let’s add an administration panel where we get an overview of all articles and where we can create, update and delete them – this means, building all CRUD operations.

Authentication

The administration dashboard works, but until now, everybody could use it. In this section, we change that by adding authentication with JSON web tokens. Also, we’re going to introduce Angular interceptors, route guards and a small middleware.

IISNode

Finally, we are able to deploy our blog. In this section, you’re going to learn how to build and publish the Angular Universal client and the Node web service on a Windows Server with Internet Information Services.

What tools are we using?

All the tools we’re going to use in this course are available for free.

• Visual Studio Code – A source-code editor developed by Microsoft for Windows, Linux, and macOS. We will use this code editor for the Angular client application as well as the Node.js web service.
• HeidiSQL – A free and open-source administration tool we will use and install together with MariaDB. It’s perfectly suited to see the data we’re going to store in the database.
• Postman – A greate choice for API testing. Later during this course, we will use Postman to run API calls against the Node.js web service.
• Google Chrome – It’s not necessary to use Google Chrome, any web browser with developer tools is useful here. We’re going to use the developer tools for its console output and inspecting the HTML of our web application.
• Git – This one’s totally optional. I recommend using Git as source control. You can use it locally or push your code to a hoster like GitHub. The complete code written in this course is available on GitHub, for instance.

Who is this course for?

This course is suited for students who…

• …already have a little experience with Angular
• …want to up their game with Angular and Node.js
• …learn the skills to build a modern web application with Angular, Node.js, MariaDB and Sequelize from the ground up
• …want to create a portfolio website or private blog completely on their own without using any third-party services

Angular 8 Development w/ Node.js & MariaDB