Until now, to run the application, you've used the local development environment, along with the following command:

 ng serve 

For the sake of deployment, as will be covered in a later chapter, the app needs to be built for distribution purposes, meaning its finalized artifacts should be generated to be ready for deployment.

Angular CLI projects support distribution. Open the Terminal in the project folder and run the following command:

ng build

Afterward, you should see that a folder has been created, named dist. This folder contains the finalized artifacts of the application, which generally need to be hosted in an HTTP endpoint to become accessible.

When deploying to production, you should execute the following command:

ng build --prod

This command instructs Angular CLI to use the production configuration, as well as to enable the Ahead-of-Time (AOT) build process, which produces better-optimized artifacts for production purposes.