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 pnpm:

npm install -g pnpm

Third, install NPM dependencies:

pnpm install --frozen-lockfile

Now you should be ready to build the DevTools extension.

Dev builds

To run the extension in development mode run:

pnpm devtools:devserver

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.

Running End-to-End Tests

Before running end-to-end tests, you need to start the development server using:

pnpm devtools:devserver

You have two options for running cypress, you can use the interactive cypress UI or you can run Cypress in headless mode.

To open Cypress for Angular DevTools in interactive mode, run:

pnpm devtools:e2e:open

To run Cypress tests headless, use:

pnpm devtools:test:e2e

Release builds

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

pnpm devtools:build:chrome:release
pnpm devtools:build:firefox:release

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.