Tuesday, September 19, 2017

Google Cloud Platform for a Full-stack Angular Web Application

At first blush, getting a complete Angular web application deployed and running on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) can be a daunting task. Each quickstart tutorial is reasonable enough, but if you read ahead through all of the various documentation pages you'll need, they can soon begin to snowball.



UPDATE: After I started writing this post, I discovered a Google lab that covers the same topic: Build a Node.js & Angular Web App Using Google Cloud Platform.

I'll just quickly provide an overview of deploying Angular as the front-end app (on Google App Engine) and MySQL with a Node.js API on the backend. MySQL will run on Cloud SQL and Node.js runs on App Engine.

The basic steps involved are:

1. Set up a GCP account and project

2. Download the Angular sample and install the requirements

3. Deploy your Angular front-end app to GCP

4. Set up a MySQL DB on Cloud SQL. I wrote a whole post about setting on MySQL on Google Cloud SQL.

5. Complete the tutorial for using Google Cloud with Node.js

Since these samples aren't linked, you'll have to test the pieces separately until you develop some interaction in your Angular app. You can use Postman to test your Node.js API.