Combining Angular2 and Spring Boot is a great way of getting up and running quickly with a new web application. However, it can be challenging to fit all the different pieces together in the beginning. In this blog post we will create a new project that is easy to build and run across different environments. The goal is to create a minimal, but runnable, application with as little dependencies and setup as possible. You can then start expanding the application however you see fit. We will create the Angular2 application using angular-cli. This allows us to easily generate a new project with a clear structure. This will also make it easy to add new elements to our Angular2 application. When adding new elements with angular-cli, we will maintain the same structure and wire the new elements together automatically. Angular-cli is an npm module, so it requires Node and npm to install and run. Make sure to install a recent version of both of these applications before continuing with the steps below. We will use Maven as the overall build manager for our application. The steps should be easy to follow and will not require a lot of work. However, you can get the result directly in this GitHub repository if you want to. There is a seperate commit for every step.

The first step is to generate a new Spring Boot project at https://start.spring.io. I've used the values in the screenshot below. Of course you can use your own group and artifact ids. We need at least the Web plugin to let Spring Boot serve the Angular2 application. If you already know you need more dependencies for your project, feel free to add them. Click on Generate Project to download the zip file with your new Spring Boot project. Extract the zip file somewhere on your computer. Then open a command prompt and go to the newly created project directory.

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