We'll be using Node's built-in web server for our project from Chapter 12, Integrating Backend Data Services, onward. But, since we've got a little while to go before we get to that point, we need to have a simple interim solution.

We've not spoken about browsers before because there wasn't a need to do so—but now, there's a need. While it doesn't matter which browser you use for viewing Angular applications, it would be easier—though not essential — for us to use the same browser while we work through this book together. My browser of choice, while I develop web applications, is Chrome. As with most browsers, Chrome has a ton of extensions that other developers have created that do everything from providing subscription notifications to debugging tools and more. You can download Chrome for the operating system of your choice from here: https://www.google.com/chrome/. You can search for and install extensions for Chrome from the Chrome Web Store at https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/extensions. We'll be using Chrome, and specifically, a few of its extensions, for a few things in this book.

The first order of business is to install a Chrome extension that will help us serve up the pages we build for our application. It's called, Web Server for Chrome and you can search for it and install it from the Chrome Web Store. I didn't include the link to it directly because the URL was incredibly long.

This extension allows you to select a folder for where the files you wish to be served are located, as well as a port to listen on. There are other options that you can select as well. One common case option that is enabled by default is to have the extension automatically show the index.html file. For example, assuming you enter 8887 for the port number, you would point your browser to http://127.0.0.1:8887 and would see that your index.html page in the folder you specify would automatically be served up in your browser. Once you have these two settings configured, you're off to the races and can view the pages we create.