Loiane Groner

Loiane Groner

Getting Started with Angular Material 2

30 Jul 2017
9 mins read

This article will show you how to setup your Angular project (v2+) using Angular Material 2.

Update December 2017: code updated to Angular v5+ and Material v5+. Stackblitz link also available at the end of this article.

Update May 2018: code updated to Angular v6 and added new section about CLI v6.

Contents

1: Create your Angular project with Angular CLI

The first step is creating your Angular project using Angular CLI.

For this example we will use the following command:

ng new angular-material-example --routing -is -st -style=scss

With the command above, we are asking Angular CLI to create a new project with a routing module (--routing), use inline style (-is) for app.component.ts, skip the creation of unit testing files (-st) - since we will not need .spec file for this example and also use scss as extension for our style/CSS files.

It will create a new project with the following files:

2: npm install @angular-material and hammerjs

Next, we need to install @angular-material and its required dependencies. Change the directory to the project we created (cd angular-material-example) and execute the following command:

npm install --save @angular/material @angular/cdk hammerjs

2.1: ng add @angular/material (Angular v6+)

Since Angular v6 and Angular CLI v6, a new command is available to automatically install and configure Angular Material: ng add @angular/material. This command will install do the following:

By using the ng add @angular/material command, three material components will be available in Angular CLI through schematics:

Personally, I still prefer importing the theme and Material Icons as described at section #4 of this article, so I use the ng add command and remove the imports from index.html and angular.json

3: Configure angular.json and hammerjs

Hammer.js is an optional dependency and helps with touch support for a few of the components (mat-slide-toggle, mat-slider, atTooltip).

I like to always include hammerjs as a dependency as well. And we also need to include its import in angular-cli.json. Locate the scripts section and add the hammer.min.js import:

"scripts": [
  "node_modules/hammerjs/hammer.min.js"
],

Note: if you are using Angular v5 or below, please use the following code instead in angular-cli.json (as some structure files were updated in Angular v6+):

"scripts": [
  "../node_modules/hammerjs/hammer.min.js"
],

4: Include a theme and Material Icons

To add a theme to our project, open src/style.css or src/style.scss and add:

@import '~@angular/material/prebuilt-themes/indigo-pink.css';

Angular Material 2 comes with 4 pre built themes: indigo-pink, deeppurple-amber, purple-green and pink-bluegrey.

You can replace indigo-pink.css with any of the options mentioned above.

By using ng add @angular/material, the theme will be automatically imported in angular.json, so no need to add to your css or scss.

Material Icons

If you need to use icons in your application, you can also import Material Design icons.

If you are using css as file extension, include the following in your src/style.css before the material theme import:

@import '~https://fonts.googleapis.com/icon?family=Material+Icons';

If you are using scss as file extension, include the following import in your src/style.scss file (before the material theme import):

@import url('https://fonts.googleapis.com/icon?family=Material+Icons');

By using ng add @angular/material, the icons will be automatically imported in index.html, so no need to add to your css or scss.

Local support to Material Icons

If you prefer to host Material Icons locally, you can also follow the next steps.

First, install material-design-icons from npm:

npm install material-design-icons --save

In your src/style.css add the following import:

@import '~material-design-icons/iconfont/material-icons.css';

And that’s it!

5: Configure app.module

Some Angular Material components depend on @angular/animations package. Open your package.json and confirm if it has been already installed (Angular CLI already adds it as a dependency along with other @angular packages). If it is not installed, then install it with the command below:

npm install --save @angular/animations

Make sure you use the same version as the other @angular packages.

Open app.module.ts and configure the animations package.

If you would like Material components to be animated, then add BrowserAnimationsModule to the app.module imports section:

//other EcmaScript imports
import { BrowserAnimationsModule } from '@angular/platform-browser/animations';

@NgModule({
  imports: [
    //other imports
    BrowserAnimationsModule
  ]
})
export class AppModule { }

If you would not like to use animations, then replace BrowserAnimationsModule with NoopAnimationsModule in the code above.

By using ng add @angular/material, the BrowserAnimationsModule will be automatically added to app.module.ts.

6: Using Material Components

Now the setup is already in place and we can start coding!

We can open app.component.html and start adding our Material components HTML tags. But we will do some extra steps so we have a project a little bit more organized.

Creating a HomeComponent page

Let’s create a new module and component using Angular CLI:

ng g m home --routing

With the command above the following files will be created:

├── home
|   ├── home-routing.module.ts
|   ├── home.module.ts

Now let’s also create a HomeComponent:

ng g c home/home -s

The -s flag will skip creating the .scss file and will use inline styles in the component.

Open home.component.html add add the following code:

<mat-toolbar color="primary">
  <span>Angular Material Example</span>
</mat-toolbar>

If you are using VSCode and the Angular Languague Service extension, you will get some compilation errors in your HTML template:

This is because the mat-* components are not known by Angular, hence we need to import them in our module.

Please note that Angular Material RC changed its prefix from md to mat

We can verify in the Angular Material docs which are the Material modules we need to import in our project.

For the mat-toolbar, we can go to Toolbar API tab link and we will see that we need to import MatToolbarModule.

We have two options. The first one is importing MatToolbarModule in the home.module.ts file:

import { MatToolbarModule } from '@angular/material/toolbar';

@NgModule({
  imports: [
    CommonModule,
    HomeRoutingModule,
    MatToolbarModule
  ],
  declarations: [HomeComponent]
})
export class HomeModule { }

Creating a shared MaterialModule for our project

Suppose we have another module that is also going to use the mat-toolbar component. We would need to import MatToolbarModule again in that module.

To avoid repeating the same import in several different modules in our project, we are going to create a shared MaterialModule (this is the second option, and I personally prefer using this one). This way, we only need to import the component we need once and we can import this module in any other module that is needed.

To do so, we will use Angular CLI to create a new module:

ng g m app-material

We will add any Material module in this module. Let’s start with the MatToolbarModule:

import { CommonModule } from '@angular/common';

import { MatToolbarModule } from '@angular/material/toolbar';

@NgModule({
  exports: [
    MatToolbarModule
  ]
})
export class AppMaterialModule { }

Note that we will add any Material Module we need for this project in the exports metadata.

Now we can go back to the home.module and import the shared Material module we created:

import { NgModule } from '@angular/core';
import { CommonModule } from '@angular/common';

import { HomeRoutingModule } from './home-routing.module';
import { HomeComponent } from './home/home.component';

import { AppMaterialModule } from './../app-material/app-material.module';

@NgModule({
  imports: [
    CommonModule,
    HomeRoutingModule,
    AppMaterialModule
  ],
  declarations: [HomeComponent]
})
export class HomeModule { }

Configuring the routes and app.component

Since we created a home.component, this is going to be the main Component for the home.module. So we need to add the home.component in our HomeRoutingModule:

import { HomeComponent } from './home/home.component';

const routes: Routes = [
  { path: '', component: HomeComponent }
];

Angular CLI generates app.component.ts with some starter code. For this example, we will only need the router-outlet tag, so we can simplify the code for app.component.ts:

import { Component } from '@angular/core';

@Component({
  selector: 'app-root',
  template: '<router-outlet></router-outlet>',
  styles: []
})
export class AppComponent {}

Since our template has only 1 line of code, it is OK to use the inline template (the Angular style guide says inline template is ok up to 3 lines of code).

And as a last step of our basic configuration, we need to add a routing path to the HomeModule in the app-routing.module.ts:

const routes: Routes = [
  {
    path: '', loadChildren: './home/home.module#HomeModule'
  }
];

When we load our application in the browser (path ‘’), the HomeModule will be lazy loaded and the HomeComponent will be rendered.

If we execute ng serve and open http://localhost:4200/ we will be able to see a purple-ish toolbar:

Our code now has the following structure:

This is the project structure I usually use for my Angular Material projects. Now you can add more components and modules as needed and have fun with Material components!

Adding more Material Components to home.component.html

Let’s go back to home.component.html and enhance our example. Our template should have the following code:

<mat-toolbar color="primary">
  <button mat-icon-button [matMenuTriggerFor]="menu">
    <mat-icon>more_vert</mat-icon>
  </button>
  <span>Angular Material Example</span>

  <mat-menu #menu="matMenu">
    <button mat-menu-item>
    <mat-icon>dialpad</mat-icon>
    <span>Menu 1</span>
  </button>
    <button mat-menu-item disabled>
    <mat-icon>voicemail</mat-icon>
    <span>Menu 2</span>
  </button>
    <button mat-menu-item>
    <mat-icon>notifications_off</mat-icon>
    <span>Menu 3</span>
  </button>
  </mat-menu>
</mat-toolbar>

<mat-card class="example-card">
  <mat-card-header>
    <div mat-card-avatar class="example-header-image"></div>
    <mat-card-title>Angular</mat-card-title>
    <mat-card-subtitle>Material 2</mat-card-subtitle>
  </mat-card-header>
  <img mat-card-image src="https://loiane.com/images/tags/angular.svg" height="300px">
  <mat-card-content>
    <p>
      Material Design components for Angular
    </p>
  </mat-card-content>
  <mat-card-actions>
    <button mat-button>LIKE</button>
    <button mat-button>SHARE</button>
  </mat-card-actions>
</mat-card>

We also need to go back to app-material.module.ts and add the additional Material components we are using the HTML code above:

import { NgModule } from '@angular/core';

import { MatToolbarModule } from '@angular/material/toolbar';
import { MatIconModule } from '@angular/material/icon';
import { MatButtonModule } from '@angular/material/button';
import { MatMenuModule } from '@angular/material/menu';
import { MatCardModule } from '@angular/material/card';

@NgModule({
  exports: [
    MatToolbarModule,
    MatIconModule,
    MatButtonModule,
    MatMenuModule,
    MatCardModule
  ]
})
export class AppMaterialModule { }

After the changes above, this will be the output in the browser:

Tip: Angular Material VSCode Extension

VSCode has a very good extension to work with Angular Material components.

In the HTML templates we can simply type mat- and the extension provide code snippets for the components available in angulat material.

This is the extension I use: Angular Material 2, Flex layout 1, Covalent 1 & Material icon snippets.

This extension is also part of the Angular extension package I created to work with Angular projects: Angular Extension Pack

Source code + live demo + Stackblitz

Source code available on GitHub

Live demo

Stackblitz online demo

References:

Happy coding!

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