Angular 6.0.0 is now available. According to the team, this is a major release focused on the toolchain rather than the underlying framework.
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As previously reported, with this release the team will be synchronizing major versions of the framework packages, CLI and Material + CDK going forward, which are all available as 6.0 as of today, the team explained. “We made this change to clarify cross compatibility. The minor and patch releases for these three projects will be issued based on the project’s needs,” Stephen Fluin, developer advocate for Angular, wrote in a post.
In addition, ‘ng update <package>/ has been added to help users adopt the correct version of dependencies and keep them in sync. “`ng update` will not replace your package manager, but will use npm or yarn under the hood to manage dependencies. In addition to updating dependencies and peer dependencies, `ng update` will apply needed transforms to your project,” Fluin wrote.
The team hopes to add more libraries and packages to ‘ng update’ over the upcoming months. The CLI command ‘ng add <package>’ is also now available to help developers add new capabilities to their projects. Some of the capabilities include the ability to turn an app to a PWA, add ng-bootstrap, and install and setup Angular Material.
Other features include the first release of Angular Elements, a new tree component for displaying hierarchical data in Angular Material + CDK Components, new starter components, support for workspaces containing multiple projects, and support for creating and building libraries.
Version 6 of Angular also updates RxJS to RxJS version 6.
Lastly, the team announced it would be expanding its Long Term Support to all major releases. “Previously we announced that only v4 and v6 will be LTS releases but in order to make updating from one major to the next easier, and give bigger projects more time to plan updates, we decided to extend the long-term support to all major releases starting with v4,” Fluin wrote.