ng-bootstrap AoT build failure with Unexpected Token and missing loader - webpack-2

Question

I am trying to use ng-bootstrap library in my project. Runs fine with webpackdevserver and jit build but aot build throw errors similar to following
Module parse failed: E:\SVNCode\Learning\spa\aot\node_modules\#ng-
bootstrap\ng-bootstrap\alert\alert.ngfactory.ts Unexpected token (13:21)
You may need an appropriate loader to handle this file type.
I have searched for the issue but the only reference related to ng-bootstrap was ticket no. #1381 on github, which was closed without any further details. So, I believe that I may be missing something very small. Here are relevant details
Node : 8.1.3
Angular & Compiler-cli: 4.2.4
Webpack : 2.6.1
typescript : 2.3.4
ng-bootstrap : 1.0.0-alpha.26
bootstrap : 4.0.0-alpha.6 (using CDN but tried after install also with
same result)
webpack.prod.js
let ExtractTextPlugin = require('extract-text-webpack-plugin');
let webpack = require('webpack');
let HtmlWebpackPlugin = require('html-webpack-plugin');
let CompressionPlugin = require("compression-webpack-plugin");
let CopyWebpackPlugin = require('copy-webpack-plugin');
let path = require('path');
let rootDir = path.resolve(__dirname, '..');
module.exports = {
entry: {
'polyfills': './spa/polyfills.ts',
'vendor': './spa/vendor-aot.ts',
'app': './spa/main-aot.ts' // AoT compilation
},
output: {
path: path.join(rootDir,'wwwroot'),
filename: 'js/[name]-[hash:6].bundle.js',
chunkFilename: 'js/[id]-[hash:6].chunk.js',
publicPath: '/'
},
resolve: {
extensions: ['.ts', '.js', '.json', '.css', '.html']
},
module: {
rules: [
{
test: /\.ts$/,
use: [
'babel-loader?presets[]=es2015',
'awesome-typescript-loader?configFileName=tsconfig-aot.json',
'angular-router-loader?aot=true&genDir=spa/aot/'
],
exclude: /node_modules/
},
{
test: /\.css$/,
loaders: ['to-string-loader', 'css-loader']
},
{
test: /\.html$/,
use: 'html-loader'
}
],
exprContextCritical: false
},
plugins: [
new webpack.optimize.CommonsChunkPlugin({
name: ['app', 'vendor', 'polyfills']
}),
new webpack.LoaderOptionsPlugin({
minimize: true,
debug: false
}),
new webpack.optimize.UglifyJsPlugin({
beautify: false,
compress: {
warnings: false
},
output: {
comments: false
},
sourceMap: false,
mangle: {keep_fnames: true}
}),
new CompressionPlugin({
asset: "[path].gz[query]",
algorithm: "gzip",
test: /\.js$|\.html$/,
threshold: 10240,
minRatio: 0.8
}),
new ExtractTextPlugin("[name].css"),
new HtmlWebpackPlugin({
template: './spa/index.html'
}),
new CopyWebpackPlugin([
{ from: path.join(rootDir,'spa','assets'), to: 'assets'}
]),
new webpack.NoEmitOnErrorsPlugin()
]
};
tsconfig-aot.js
{
"compilerOptions": {
"target": "es2015",
"module": "commonjs",
"moduleResolution": "node",
"sourceMap": false,
"emitDecoratorMetadata": true,
"experimentalDecorators": true,
"removeComments": true,
"noImplicitAny": true,
"suppressImplicitAnyIndexErrors": true,
"lib": ["es2015","dom"],
"typeRoots": ["node_modules/#types"],
"types":["node", "core-js"]
},
"files": [
"spa/app/app.module.ts",
"spa/main-aot.ts"
],
"exclude": ["node_modules"],
"angularCompilerOptions": {
"genDir": "spa/aot",
"skipMetadataEmit": true
},
"awesomeTypescriptLoaderOptions":{
"useWebpackText": true,
"useCache": true
}
}
vendor-aot.ts
import '#angular/platform-browser';
import '#angular/core';
import '#angular/common';
import '#angular/http';
import '#angular/forms';
import '#angular/router';
import '#angular/platform-browser/animations';
import 'rxjs';
//can import others e.g. bootstrap, jquery etc
//can import js, ts, css, sass etc..
import '#ng-bootstrap/ng-bootstrap';
Thanks & Regards

Answer 1

After searching the internet high and low, going through several stackoverflow posts and github project configurations/samples, I finally managed to fix it (duct tape way).
All I had to do to fix the issue was remove the exclusion of node_modules folder in webpack config file.
Now, WHY exclusion of node_modules works for angular and rxjs packages but not for ng-bootstrap, is still beyond me.
Exclusion works when building for jit but for aot to succeed node_modules HAS TO BE INCLUDED in ts loader chain. Now the build time for aot has increased multifold, but at least it works.