Angular root path and IIS Express

Home / Angular root path and IIS Express

Often, web applications aren’t deployed to the root path of a web server. Also, often, developers (me included) develop applications with the intent of deploying to the root path.

Overcoming this problem with an Angular app, while also making a local build against IIS Express and a production deploy work, is relatively straight forward.


With Angular, setting a root, or base, path is simple. We add a “base” element right after the head element of our pages. Angular will utilize this base on ALL requests.

<base href="/myApp/" /> 

The only thing we have to be aware of is that all of our paths in $resource, $http, templates refs, or whatever have to be relative paths. IE – there should be no leading slashes. With only that tiny bit of information, Angular will append “/myApp/” to every request.

In Visual Studio’s IIS Express settings, we need to be explicit about the default path as well:

With that bit of configuration in place, I can browse to my app at the sub-folder path and everything works as expected.

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