The CLI supports running a live browser reload experience to users by running ng serve. This will compile the application upon file saves and reload the browser with the newly compiled application. This is done by hosting the application in memory and serving it via webpack-dev-server.
If you wish to get a similar experience with the application output to disk please use the steps below. This practice will allow you to ensure that serving the contents of your dist dir will be closer to how your application will behave when it is deployed.
You will not be using webpack-dev-server, so you will need to install a web server for the browser to request the application. There are many to choose from but a good one to try is lite-server as it will auto-reload your browser when new files are output.
You will need two terminals to get the live-reload experience. The first will run the build in a watch mode to compile the application to the dist folder. The second will run the web server against the dist folder. The combination of these two processes will mimic the same behavior of ng serve.
ng build --watchlite-server --baseDir="dist"When using lite-server the default browser will open to the appropriate URL.