How to serve up images in Angular2?

Question

I am trying to put the relative path to one of my images in my assets folder in an image src tag in my Angular2 app. I set a variable in my component to 'fullImagePath' and used that in my template. I have tried many different possible paths, but just cannot seem to get my image up. Is there some special path in Angular2 that is always relative to a static folder like in Django ?

Component

import { Component, OnInit } from '@angular/core';

@Component({
  selector: 'app-hero',
  templateUrl: './hero.component.html',
  styleUrls: ['./hero.component.css']
})

export class HeroComponent implements OnInit {
  fullImagePath: string;

  constructor() {
    this.fullImagePath = '../../assets/images/therealdealportfoliohero.jpg'
  }

  ngOnInit() {
  }

}

I also put the picture into the same folder as this component, so since the template, and css in the same folder is working I'm not sure why a similar relative path to the image is not working. This is the same component with the image in the same folder.

import { Component, OnInit } from '@angular/core';

@Component({
  selector: 'app-hero',
  templateUrl: './hero.component.html',
  styleUrls: ['./hero.component.css']
})

export class HeroComponent implements OnInit {
  fullImagePath: string;

  constructor() {
    this.fullImagePath = './therealdealportfoliohero.jpg'
  }

  ngOnInit() {
  }

}

html

<div class="row">
    <div class="col-xs-12">
        <img [src]="fullImagePath">
    </div>
</div>

app tree * I left out the node modules folder to save space

├── README.md
├── angular-cli.json
├── e2e
│   ├── app.e2e-spec.ts
│   ├── app.po.ts
│   └── tsconfig.json
├── karma.conf.js
├── package.json
├── protractor.conf.js
├── src
│   ├── app
│   │   ├── app.component.css
│   │   ├── app.component.html
│   │   ├── app.component.spec.ts
│   │   ├── app.component.ts
│   │   ├── app.module.ts
│   │   ├── hero
│   │   │   ├── hero.component.css
│   │   │   ├── hero.component.html
│   │   │   ├── hero.component.spec.ts
│   │   │   ├── hero.component.ts
│   │   │   └── portheropng.png
│   │   ├── index.ts
│   │   └── shared
│   │       └── index.ts
│   ├── assets
│   │   └── images
│   │       └── therealdealportfoliohero.jpg
│   ├── environments
│   │   ├── environment.dev.ts
│   │   ├── environment.prod.ts
│   │   └── environment.ts
│   ├── favicon.ico
│   ├── index.html
│   ├── main.ts
│   ├── polyfills.ts
│   ├── styles.css
│   ├── test.ts
│   ├── tsconfig.json
│   └── typings.d.ts
└── tslint.json

Answer 1

Angular only points to src/assets folder, nothing else is public to access via url so you should use full path

 this.fullImagePath = '/assets/images/therealdealportfoliohero.jpg'

Or

 this.fullImagePath = 'assets/images/therealdealportfoliohero.jpg'

This will only work if the base href tag is set with /

You can also add other folders for data in angular/cli. All you need to modify is angular-cli.json

"assets": [
 "assets",
 "img",
 "favicon.ico",
 ".htaccess"
]

Note in edit : Dist command will try to find all attachments from assets so it is also important to keep the images and any files you want to access via url inside assets, like mock json data files should also be in assets.