I am upgrading my Angular 17 application to Angular 18 and want to migrate to the new application builder.

I updated using ng update @angular/core@18 @angular/cli@18 and opted in to the new application builder. Afterwards, I updated the angular.json file so that the browser build’s location is using dist/project-x instead of dist/project-x/browser as suggested by the update process:

The output location of the browser build has been updated from dist/project-x to dist/project-x/browser. You might need to adjust your deployment pipeline or, as an alternative, set outputPath.browser to "" in order to maintain the previous functionality.

Here is an extract of my angular.json file:

{
  "$schema": "./node_modules/@angular/cli/lib/config/schema.json",
  "version": 1,
  "newProjectRoot": "projects",
  "projects": {
    "ps-admin-frontend": {
      // ...
      "architect": {
        "build": {
          "builder": "@angular-devkit/build-angular:application",
          "options": {
            "outputPath": {
              "base": "dist/project-x",
              "browser": ""
            },
            // ...
          },
          // ...
          "configurations": {
            // ...
            "development": {
              // ...
              "outputPath": {
                "base": "dist/project-x",
                "browser": ""
              }
            }
            // ...

ng build, ng build --configuration development and ng build --configuration production works as expeced, however, when overriding the output path in the command, then it does not work as expected:

ng build --base-href=/x/ --output-path=/projects/project-x-backend/wwwroot 
    --watch --configuration development --verbose

How can I get rid of the browser folder using ng build --watch with a custom output path? (I would like to avoid setting the output path to /projects/project-x-backend/wwwroot in angular.json itself.)