ASP Core pre/post-publish actions to install tools for Angular2 then build - visual-studio

Question

We have a .NET Core project which uses Angular2 as frontend client. This frontend is located in our solution in a Frontend directory.
This frontend contains the package.json and angular-cli.json to isolate all that fron the rest of the .NET project. On ng build, Angular2 compiled files are sent to ../wwwroot directory.
Our project structure:
We want, when someone checkout the project AND on publish (on Azure) to be able to call these actions:
npm install -g angular-cli
cd Frontend && npm install && ng build --prod
How to achieve this in the project.json .NET Core file?
I tried for example, targetting a deployement on Azure, to set this up:
"prepublish": [ "npm install -g angular-cli" ],
"postpublish": [ "cd Frontend && npm install && ng build --prod", "dotnet publish-iis --publish-folder %publish:OutputPath% --framework %publish:FullTargetFramework%" ]
But it breaks the deploy. Are both the prepublish and postbublish (with cd Frontend and subsequent commands) valid?
And how to make VisualStudio do the same thing when the people checking out the git repo and hit build?

Answer 1

In general, you may use any tasks runner (gulp, npm tasks, etc) and in postpublish step (or other step like prebuild) just execute appropriate tasks.
As alternative you could even do steps in opposite direction and call dotnet commands (build, deploy, ...) from your, lets say, npm task script. For example, you could look into this repo that is example of using ASP.NET Core and Angular2 with Webpack. They use those npm tasks as entry point of any actions like build, run or deploy:
The npm package.json configuration loads all the required packages for Angular 2 and Webpack. The Webpack packages are all added to the devDependencies. A “npm build” script and also a “npm buildProduction” are also configured, so that the client application can be built using Webpack from the cmd line using “npm build” or “npm buildProduction”.