Allow disabling CLI cache in `ng serve` via command-line flag

[bartadaniel]

Command

serve

Description

Currently, the recommended way to disable the Angular CLI cache is via ng cache enable and ng cache disable, which modifies the cli.cache.enabled setting in angular.json.

In some situations, I need to disable the cache while serving the app. However, I’d prefer not to change the project configuration every time, especially since doing so slows down the build process and requires cleanup before committing. Each time I need the cache disabled, I have to manually edit angular.json and later revert the change. It'd be great if I could avoid these steps.

Describe the solution you'd like

Having a --no-cache option for ng serve would make this workflow much smoother. It would disable caching only for that specific run, leaving the global configuration untouched.

Describe alternatives you've considered

I can automate this process using the trap command in a shell script, but since trap doesn’t work on Windows, I’d need to maintain a custom script, which complicates things unnecessarily for this simple problem.

[alan-agius4]

Out of curiosity why sometimes do you need to disable the cache during ng serve?

[angular-robot]

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[bartadaniel]

I work on a JS/WASM npm package. When I need to debug the integration into my Angular application, I use npm link so the package resides in my node_modules.
If I don’t disable the Angular CLI cache, changes to the WASM file are not picked up as the older version remains cached, and I can’t test my updates.

On the other hand, when I’m working on "regular" Angular development tasks, I prefer to keep caching enabled for performance reasons.

So I frequently need to toggle caching, but I’d rather not modify angular.json each time. Having something similar to a --no-cache flag for ng serve would solve this nicely.

[alan-agius4]

In that case you can use configure the dev-server not to prebundle and cache that particular library.

Example:

"serve": {
    "builder": "@angular-devkit/build-angular:dev-server",
    "options": {
        "prebundle": {
            "exclude": ["lib"]
        }
    }
}

Alternatively you can use ng serve --no-prebundle

[bartadaniel]

Indeed, thanks for pointing that out. One more reason to migrate to esbuild.

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