Deploying basic Angular 2 app to Google App Engine

Question

I can use Angular 2 to create basic front-end applications and can use python to create back-ends with endpoints on Google App engine. I can't however seem to figure out how to put the two together and deploy them with the cloud SDK.

Here is a basic example where I can't even host a simple angular2 app with no back-end calls on GAE. I have taken the dist folder after building with angular2 CLI and tried to connect to it with the app.yaml file. It seems to work in the browser developer (dev_appserver.py app.yaml) although I get some 404 errors in SDK with the GET requests to do with my index.html file I think. I then create a blank index.yaml file and try to deploy it but get a 404 Error at the appspot.com location. This is the app.yaml file:

application:
version:
runtime: python27
threadsafe: true
api_version: 1

handlers:
- url: /favicon\.ico
  static_files: favicon.ico
  upload: favicon\.ico

- url: (.*)/
  static_files: dist\1/index.html
  upload: dist

- url: (.*)
  static_files: dist\1
  upload: dist

I really have no idea what I am doing wrong. Do I need some kind of a main.application python back-end to connect to the dist files or? Do I need to include node modules or some other kind or files from Angular2? Any help would be massively appreciated! Thanks

Answer 1

For the latest versions of Angular 4 and App Engine I built the following:

service: stage
runtime: python27
api_version: 1
threadsafe: true

skip_files:
- ^(?!dist)  # Skip any files not in the dist folder

handlers:
# Routing for bundles to serve directly
- url: /((?:inline|main|polyfills|styles|vendor)\.[a-z0-9]+\.bundle\.js)
  secure: always
  redirect_http_response_code: 301
  static_files: dist/\1
  upload: dist/.*

# Routing for a prod styles.bundle.css to serve directly
- url: /(styles\.[a-z0-9]+\.bundle\.css)
  secure: always
  redirect_http_response_code: 301
  static_files: dist/\1
  upload: dist/.*

# Routing for typedoc, assets and favicon.ico to serve directly
- url: /((?:assets|docs)/.*|favicon\.ico)
  secure: always
  redirect_http_response_code: 301
  static_files: dist/\1
  upload: dist/.*

# Any other requests are routed to index.html for angular to handle so we don't need hash URLs
- url: /.*
  secure: always
  redirect_http_response_code: 301
  static_files: dist/index.html
  upload: dist/index\.html
  http_headers:
    Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains
    X-Frame-Options: DENY

Looking for feedback on how this could be improved.