Getting the angular app to run when using protractor

问题

I must be missing something here ...

I'm trying to use protractor to run e2e tests for my angular application. The configuration file is something along the lines of:

allScriptsTimeout: 11000,

specs: [          
    'src/**/*.e2e.js'
],

capabilities: {
    browserName: 'firefox'
},

baseUrl: 'http://localhost:8000/app/',

framework: 'jasmine',

jasmineNodeOpts: {
    showColors: true,
    isVerbose : true,
    includeStackTrace : true,
    defaultTimeoutInterval: 30000
}

The test looks something like this:

describe('example test', function() {
    beforeEach(function () {
        browser.get('index.html');
    });

    it('should test something trivial', function() {
        expect(2).toEqual(2);
    });
});

I'm using grunt to run it, with "grunt-protractor-runner". When grunt gets to the protractor task, I see the following (running grunt with --verbose):

Starting selenium standalone server...
[launcher] Running 1 instances of WebDriver
Selenium standalone server started at http://172.17.113.30:53524/wd/hub

Then the firefox browser window opens, and resolves the URL correctly to: http://localhost:8000/app/index.html

However (and here's the question finally ...), firefox cannot find the page, i.e. I get the following error:

I tried running it with Chrome as well, but I get the same result.

My question is, what am I missing ? In other words, who's job it is to get the angular app deployed at localhost:8000 ? Is the deployment done by protractor/selenium/grunt, or do I need to deploy it on some webserver myself ?

Given that I can't find any question like mine online, I guess I'm missing something trivial here. Please help.