Integrating Your Angular App with the Fresh Framework: Easy guide

If you are here, maybe you are where I started, for this tutorial I am assuming that you already have Deno and Angular installed, this process does apply for Ionic too.

Let's get started with this integration. You just need to create a fresh project with Deno. It doesn't matter if you already have a project created, but please note that we will need to add several files to the assets folder later on. You'll see.

Start the project with Fresh using Deno:

deno run -A -r https://fresh.deno.dev fresh-angular && cd fresh-angular

Fill up the initial questions to setup your project, now, start a new project with Angular or Ionic (In my case I will use Ionic 7 with Angular 15):

ionic start my-project tabs --type=angular --no-git

Now your file structure may look like this:

Integration

Now we must make a few changes, inside the folder routes, create a folder called app, and create a file called [...app].ts and paste this code within the file recently created:

import { Handlers } from '$fresh/server.ts'

export const handler: Handlers = {
    async GET() {

        const filePath = new URL('file://'+Deno.cwd()+'/static/index.html').pathname;
        let fileSize;
        try {
          fileSize = (await Deno.stat(filePath)).size;
        } catch (e) {
          return new Response(null, { status: 500 });
        }
        const body = (await Deno.open(filePath)).readable;
        const resp = new Response(body);
        resp.headers.set("content-length", fileSize.toString());
        resp.headers.set("content-type", "text/html; charset=utf-8");
        return resp;

    }
}

Don't start the project yet!

Open your VSCode terminal and write this command into it: cd App && ng build --configuration=production

Inside your /App folder you must now see a folder called www, now let's create a helper to move that folder into our /static folder.

On your root directory create a file called sync.ts and paste the following code:

let htmlContent = await Deno.readTextFile('./App/www/index.html');
const entries: string[] = [];

console.log('Checking directories...')
for await (const dirEntry of Deno.readDir('./App/www')) {
   if(dirEntry.name.endsWith('.js')) entries.push(`<script src="${dirEntry.name}" type="module"></script>`);
}

htmlContent = htmlContent.replace(/<script src=".+" type="module"><\/script>/gm, entries.toString()).replace('<base href="/">', '<base href="/app">');

const sourceDir = "./App/www";
const destinationDir = "./static";

console.log('Removing old files...');
for await (const dirEntry of Deno.readDir('./static')) {
    if(dirEntry.name !== 'save') Deno.removeSync('./static/' + dirEntry.name, { recursive: true });
 }

console.log('Updating files...');
for await (const dirEntry of Deno.readDir(sourceDir)) {
  const sourcePath = `${sourceDir}/${dirEntry.name}`;
  const destinationPath = `${destinationDir}/${dirEntry.name}`;

  await Deno.rename(sourcePath, destinationPath);
}

console.log('Rewriting index.html...')
await Deno.writeTextFile('./static/index.html', htmlContent);

Before ending, you must go to your deno.json and add this script inside the task object:

"sync": "cd App && ng build --configuration=production && cd .. && deno run -A sync.ts"

Finally, if you reach here, just run on your terminal in the root project deno task start and follow the link showed on the terminal usually http://localhost:8000 or manually write on the searchbar of your browser http://localhost:8000/app to watch your Angular App working inside your Fresh Project.

Hope this post helps you!