This question comes in from a reader of one of my books, who was curious about how to deploy an Angular application to his ColdFusion server.
The Learn with books primarily focus on the development process and I don't cover the dev ops or deployment side of things.
My question: besides working locally while reading the book, I am assuming that I need to find a server that offers ColdFusion and allows me to work with Node, correct?
This is what I told him.
For local development, you can run both ColdFusion and NodeJS locally with no issue. The Angular CLI has a development server, and you can set up a proxy to call your local ColdFusion server. This is covered in the book.
All the backend services to the books use the same approach, including PHP, Java, and NodeJS.
If you want to deploy the app to a production server, you can create a production build with the Angular CLI and that will give you HTML/CSS/JS files you can push up to your existing web server. You do not need to install NodeJS on the server for this to work.
Howeer, If you want to do automated deployments using Jenkins, docker, and/or microservices, things get a bit more complex. In that situation, my team uses an NGINX Docker Image as the base and we move the production version of the Angular code into the NGINX root directory, so even with our production build we do not have NodeJS running a web server.
I've never delved deep into the process for running and deploying an application even though that is the approach most modern teams use. Often we set it up once and forget about it.
I hope this helps someone.