Creating a Custom Loading Screen in Angular

Published on March 6, 2017

Creating a Custom Loading Screen in Angular

By default Angular apps show a small unstyled Loading… at the top left corner of the browser when first loading and bootstrapping the main app component. We can easily change that default loading indicator to pretty much whatever we want.

The following works for any Angular 2+ app.

Here’s what our loading screen will look like:

The example is a little over the top with the salmon-colored background and all, but it’s a good example of what can easily be done.

Content in Root Component Tags

Notice how, in your app’s main index.html file, the default Loading… is just inserted between the app’s root component tags:

index.html

<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <title>Fancy Loading Screen</title>
  <base href="/">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
  <link rel="icon" type="image/x-icon" href="favicon.ico">
</head>
<body>

  <app-root>Loading...</app-root>

</body>
</html>

And if you inspect your app after it’s fully loaded, that Loading… text is nowhere to be found, because it gets completely replaced with the content of the root component’s template.

That means that we can put anything between these tags, including style definitions and it’ll be completely wiped out once Angular has finished loading and bootstrapping the root component:

<app-root>
  <style>
    app-root {
      color: purple;
    }
  </style>
  I'm a purple loading message!
</app-root>

We don’t have to worry about these styles affecting our app after it’s loaded because everything gets completely discarded.

Now you can go crazy there and do just about anything. An idea would be to include some kind of CSS or SVG spinner.

Here in our example, we give our page a pink background, we center our loading message with Flexbox, give it a prettier system font, and we even add a fancy animation to the ellipsis:

<app-root>
  <style>
  app-root {
    display: flex;
    justify-content: center;
    align-items: center;
    height: 100vh;

    color: pink;
    text-transform: uppercase;
    font-family: -apple-system,
        BlinkMacSystemFont,
        "Segoe UI",
        Roboto,
        Oxygen-Sans,
        Ubuntu,
        Cantarell,
        Helvetica,
        sans-serif;
    font-size: 2.5em;
    text-shadow: 2px 2px 10px rgba(0,0,0,0.2);
  }
  body {
    background: salmon;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
  }

  @keyframes dots {
    50% {
      transform: translateY(-.4rem);
    }
    100% {
      transform: translateY(0);
    }
  }

  .d {
    animation: dots 1.5s ease-out infinite;
  }
  .d-2 {
    animation-delay: .5s;
  }
  .d-3 {
    animation-delay: 1s;
  }
  </style>

  Loading<span class="d">.</span><span class="d d-2">.</span><span class="d d-3">.</span>
</app-root>

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