If you are new to Angular application development and if you run ng serve
command out side of your Angular root directory you will get Error: This command is not available when running the Angular CLI outside a workspace
error.
For example let’s create an new Angular application inside a folder called Angular Applications
.
Open your command prompt or terminal and run ng new
command to create the new Angular application.
D:\Angular Applications>ng new shoppingapp
It will create a new folder called shoppingapp
and that folder contains our Angular source code.
Now D:\Angular Applications\shoppingapp
is our Angular project root directory.
You have to navigate to project root directory and then you have to run ng serve
.
D:\Angular Applications> cd shoppingapp
D:\Angular Applications\shoppingapp>ng serve
Most of the newbie Angular developers won’t navigate to Angular root directory, after creating the application.
And runs the command in the parent folder. In that case they will get Error: This command is not available when running the Angular CLI outside a workspace
error.
To avoid Error: This command is not available when running the Angular CLI outside a workspace
you should always run ng serve
command in Angular root directory.
Our Angular root directory contains Angular CLI configuration file i.e, angular.json
file.
ng serve
command try to look for this configuration file while executing the command. If there is no angular.json
file it will return error.
If you delete the angular.json
file or If you rename to other name you will get the same error.
So be careful while doing any changes to the files generated by Angular CLI.