I set up a fresh angular-app and try to serve it with

ng serve --watch

instead of serving the app a file-editor opens. Why does that happen? How can I resolve this?

this is the editor that shows

Serving with

npm start

works fine

I set up a fresh angular-app and try to serve it with

ng serve --watch

instead of serving the app a file-editor opens. Why does that happen? How can I resolve this?

this is the editor that shows

Serving with

npm start

works fine

• javascript
• angular
• ubuntu

• what happens if you just use ngas a command? maybe there's another software or alias that also listens to the ng command – Benedikt Schmidt Commented Dec 13, 2017 at 9:03
• the same thing happens, the editor opens – NDDT Commented Dec 13, 2017 at 10:28
• how can I remove this software and restore ng as the angular command? – NDDT Commented Dec 13, 2017 at 10:28
• that's probably tricky, which OS are you on? usually there are commands to find out where the source of the software is something like which ng on Linux – Benedikt Schmidt Commented Dec 13, 2017 at 10:29
• I'm on ubuntu, in a vagrant box. which ng shows "/usr/bin/ng" – NDDT Commented Dec 13, 2017 at 10:34

4 Answers 4

Solution :

Just use npx before any nodejs executables.

Eg : npx ng serve -o

I was able to resolve this by

• unistalling the editor that took the ng-alias
• uninstalling angular-cli
• reinstalling angular-cli
• manually adding the angular-cli alias

I don't know how I got there, but suddenly ng serve behaved differently and opened the ng.js file, in the default editor app actually called Editor. I run a Windows-11 OS.

I fixed the problem by going going to the environment variables menu, removing one of the values for the PATH variable. I removed the following lin, which pointed to my Angular JS:

C:\path\to\node_modules\@angular\cli\bin

1. Remove the angular cli path from your environment variables
2. Run npm config get prefix in your cmd or powershell
3. Enter the path you get from step 2 into your path environment variable

Dont forget to restart your console