Angular 4 remove hash(#) from url

Question

my app.module.ts

@NgModule({
.......
  providers: [
....
    { provide: LocationStrategy, useClass: HashLocationStrategy},
....
]
});

when

Answer 1

You can check the angular guide about deployment

Let's talk about the difference between HashLocationStrategy and PathLocationStrategy. For more info, check the docs

Angular, by default, uses PathLocationStrategy.

Let's say you have following routes in your application.

const routes: Route[] = [{
   path: '',
   redirectTo: 'home',
   pathMatch: 'full'
},
{
   path: 'home',
   component: HomeComponent
}];

When you route to this component, your address bar will look like localhost:4200/home. If you used HashLocationStrategy, it would look like localhost:4200/#home. So, what's the difference here?

• PathLocationStrategy

  When you are on page Home and hit F5 button or refresh the page, the browser will make a request to localhost:4200/home which will handled by angular-cli and you'll have your HomeComponent returned.

• HashLocationStrategy

  Likewise, when you hit F5, the browser will make the request to localhost:4200 this time, because it ignores whatever comes after #

If you don't want to have #, then remove the part you pointed out. It'll be PathLocationStrategy by default. However, this brings us to part when you run your application outside of angular-cli which means building and serving it from some server. Let's say you build your application with ng build and you have your minified, compiled javascript files. You deploy it to some server which runs on yourdomain.com

Also, you put this built, bundled angular application at some url so that people will access your application from yourdomain.com/ng-app, everything is fine here. Even, when you route to HomeComponent, it'll work and your address bar will look like yourdomain.com/ng-app/home. However, when you hit F5 at this point, your browser will make request to yourdomain.com/ng-app/home which does not exist on your server because you serve your application from /ng-app. You have to do some config at your server side so that you can serve everything that starts with /ng-app/**.

For example, my spring application has this method that returns the angular application,

@GetMapping("/ng-app/**") 

So when my server gets a request that starts with /ng-app, it just passes this to angular application which will handle the correct route.

Hope, this clarifies it for you.

Answer 2

You should rewrite the URL rules.For every server rules will be diifferent and you can try this for IIS.

=> Create web.config in src folder and copy below code.

        <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
        <configuration>

        <system.webServer>
          <rewrite>
            <rules>
              <rule name="Angular Routes" stopProcessing="true">
                <match url=".*" />
                <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll">
                  <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" 
                     negate="true" />
                  <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" 
                    negate="true" />
                </conditions>
                <action type="Rewrite" url="./index.html" />
              </rule>
            </rules>
          </rewrite>
        </system.webServer>

        </configuration>

=> add web.config path to angular-cli.json file:

    "assets": [
        "assets",
        "favicon.ico",
        "web.config"
    ],

=> Let’s build: ng build --prod