Getting Started With Angular Material 2

Angular Material 2 brings Material Design components to Angular 2+ apps. The goal of the project is to build a full array of components to make it very easy to built Material Design interfaces for mobile and desktop.

Here’s how to get started with Angular Material 2:

1. npm install angular-material & hammerjs

First install Angular Material, Angular animations, and Hammer.js in your project with these commands:

npm install --save @angular/material @angular/animations @angular/cdk

npm install --save hammerjs

Hammer.js is an optional dependency and helps with touch support for a few of the components.

2. angular-cli.json

If you decide to use Hammer.js, and given that you’ve started your project with the Angular CLI, modify your angular-cli.json file to add the Hammer.js library. Look for the Json *“scripts”* array and add the following path for hammer.js:

"scripts": [
  "../node_modules/hammerjs/hammer.min.js"
],

You may need to restart your local server for the changes to angular-cli.json to take effect.

3. Custom Material Module

Prior to Angular Material 2 Beta 3, there was a global MaterialModule that could be imported in the app module to make the components available. The downside to that is that tree-shaking is not efficient enough to remove all the unused code.

MaterialModule has therefore been deprecated in favor of defining a project-specific custom material module where you import and export only the needed components. Here’s what our module can look like:

import { NgModule } from '@angular/core';

import {
  MatButtonModule,
  MatMenuModule,
  MatToolbarModule,
  MatIconModule,
  MatCardModule
} from '@angular/material';

@NgModule({
  imports: [
    MatButtonModule,
    MatMenuModule,
    MatToolbarModule,
    MatIconModule,
    MatCardModule
  ],
  exports: [
    MatButtonModule,
    MatMenuModule,
    MatToolbarModule,
    MatIconModule,
    MatCardModule
  ]
})
export class MaterialModule {}

You’ll then import this module in the root app module.

4. Add Angular Material to your app module

Import MaterialModule and add it to your imports. You’ll also need to import the necessary for animations in your module. Your app module (e.g.: app.module.ts) will look a little bit like this:

import { BrowserModule } from '@angular/platform-browser';
import { NgModule } from '@angular/core';
import { FormsModule } from '@angular/forms';
import { HttpModule } from '@angular/http';
import { MaterialModule } from './material.module';
import { BrowserAnimationsModule } from '@angular/platform-browser/animations';

import { AppComponent } from './app.component';

@NgModule({
  declarations: [
    AppComponent
  ],
  imports: [
    BrowserModule,
    FormsModule,
    HttpModule,
    MaterialModule,
    BrowserAnimationsModule
  ],
  providers: [],
  bootstrap: [AppComponent]
})
export class AppModule { }

5. Import a pre-built theme and Material icons

There are a few pre-built themes installed automatically with Angular Material. These set the colors and basic styling. The available themes are: indigo-pink, deeppurple-amber, purple-green and pink-bluegrey.

To import a theme, you can add something like this to your global styles.css file:

@import '~@angular/material/prebuilt-themes/indigo-pink.css';

You can also have access to the Material Design icons and use named icons with the <mat-icon> component. To import them to your project, you can add this to the head section of your project’s root index.html file:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/icon?family=Material+Icons">

6. Angular Material is ready!

It’s now ready for you to start using the available Angular Material components in your templates. Here’s for example some markup for a template of a sample app:

<div>
  <mat-toolbar color="primary">
    <span><mat-icon>mood</mat-icon></span>

    <span>Yay, Material in Angular 2!</span>

    <button mat-icon-button [mat-menu-trigger-for]="menu">
      <mat-icon>more_vert</mat-icon>
    </button>
  </mat-toolbar>
  <mat-menu x-position="before" #menu="matMenu">
    <button mat-menu-item>Option 1</button>
    <button mat-menu-item>Option 2</button>
  </mat-menu>

  <mat-card>
    <button mat-button>All</button>
    <button mat-raised-button>Of</button>
    <button mat-raised-button color="primary">The</button>
    <button mat-raised-button color="accent">Buttons</button>
  </mat-card>

  <span class="done">
    <button mat-fab>
      <mat-icon>check circle</mat-icon>
    </button>
  </span>
</div>

And to this we added only the following CSS to our global styles.css:

body {
  margin: 0;
  font-family: Roboto, sans-serif;
}

mat-card {
  max-width: 80%;
  margin: 2em auto;
  text-align: center;
}
mat-toolbar-row {
  justify-content: space-between;
}

And here’s the look of our sample app:

Learning More

Here are a few more posts to help you get started:

• Angular Material 2 Quick Reference
• Angular Material: Creating a Custom Theme
• Dialogs With Angular Material

Resources & links

• The Angular Material 2 project: Website, Github repo.
• This Angular Material 2 simple app: App demo, Github repo.
• This Talk from Kara Erickson: Talk on Youtube, Github repo.