Setting up routing in an Angular application

We will kick off our project by creating a new Angular application from scratch. Execute the following command of the Angular CLI in a terminal window to create a new Angular application:

ng new my-blog --routing --style=scss

We use the ng new command to create a new Angular application, passing the following options:

• my-blog: The name of the Angular application that we want to create. The Angular CLI will create a my-blog folder in the path where we execute the command.

  Important Note

  Every command that we run in the terminal window should be run inside this folder.

• --routing: Enables routing in the Angular application.
• --style=scss: Configures the Angular application to use the SCSS stylesheet format when working with CSS styles.

When we enable routing in an Angular application, the Angular CLI imports several artifacts from the @angular/router npm package in our application:

• It creates the app-routing.module.ts file, which is the main routing module of our application:

  import { NgModule } from '@angular/core';
  import { RouterModule, Routes } from '@angular/router';
  const routes: Routes = [];
  @NgModule({
    imports: [RouterModule.forRoot(routes)],
    exports: [RouterModule]
  })
  export class AppRoutingModule { }

• It imports AppRoutingModule into the main module of our application, app.module.ts:

  import { NgModule } from '@angular/core';
  import { BrowserModule } from '@angular/platform-browser';
  import { AppRoutingModule } from './app-routing.module';
  import { AppComponent } from './app.component';
  @NgModule({
    declarations: [
      AppComponent
    ],
    imports: [
      BrowserModule,
      AppRoutingModule
    ],
    providers: [],
    bootstrap: [AppComponent]
  })
  export class AppModule { }

We configured our application to use the SCSS stylesheet format. Instead of creating the styles of our application manually, we will use the Bootstrap CSS library:

1. Execute the following command in a terminal window to install Bootstrap:

   npm install bootstrap

   We use the npm executable to install the bootstrap package from the npm registry in the previous command.

2. Add the following import statement at the top of the styles.scss file that exists in the src folder of our Angular application:

   @import "~bootstrap/scss/bootstrap";

   The styles.scss file contains CSS styles that are applied globally in our application. In the previous snippet, we import all the styles from the Bootstrap library into our application. The @import CSS rule accepts the absolute path of the bootstrap.scss file as an option, without adding the .scss extension. The ~ character represents the node_modules folder of our Angular application.

   Important Note

   The node_modules folder contains all the npm packages and libraries that our application needs, either during development or runtime.

In the following section, we will learn how to create the basic layout of our blog by creating components, such as the header and the footer.