Angular DevTools

Angular DevTools is a browser DevTools extension for debugging and profiling Angular applications.

Developing Locally

Set up

Follow the instructions below to set up your Angular DevTools development environment. Note that all commands should be executed in the repository root, not devtools/. All file paths are also relative to the repository root.

Debian Linux, MacOS, and Windows via WSL should build successfully. Building natively on Windows without WSL is not supported at the moment.

To set up your development environment, first install the correct version of Node. If you have nvm set up, this can be done with:

nvm install

Second, install Yarn:

npm install -g yarn@1

Third, install NPM dependencies:

yarn --frozen-lockfile

Now you should be ready to build the DevTools extension.

Dev builds

To run the extension in development mode run:

yarn devtools:devserver

You can also run a standalone version of the demo app with:

yarn devtools:devserver:demo-standalone

This would start a development server that you can access on http://localhost:4200. In development, Angular DevTools uses a "development shell." This is different from "chrome shell" in a way, that it runs the user's app in an iframe. DevTools then communicate with the user's app via message passing.

Release builds

You can build the release version of Angular DevTools for either Chrome or Firefox with:

yarn devtools:build:chrome
yarn devtools:build:firefox

Either way, the built extension will be at dist/bin/devtools/projects/shell-browser/src/prodapp.

Installation

For Chrome, you can install the extension from dist/bin/devtools/projects/shell-browser/src/prodapp by following the guide from here.

For Firefox, to load the extension, you can go to the about:debugging page, click the "This Firefox" option and then click the Load Temporary Add-on button. You'll have to select the manifest file in dist/bin/devtools/projects/shell-browser/src/prodapp directly.