What happens when you run ng serve?

Solution 1:

Nowadays, it uses webpack-dev-server to start a local webserver. See this question.

From the docs:

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.

Original answer:

After some research here's what I've gathered.

Angular-CLI piggybacks certain things off of Ember CLI. It would appear that ng serve is one of those things. Ember has an ember server command which is defined in this file and seems to match the behavior of ng serve.