How to run a service when the app starts in Angular 2

Stuart's answer points in the right direction, but it's not easy to find information on APP_INITIALIZER. The short version is you can use it to run initialization code before any of your other application code runs. I searched for a while and found explanations here and here, which I will summarize in case they disappear from the web.

APP_INITIALIZER is defined in angular/core. You include it in your app.module.ts like this.

import { APP_INITIALIZER } from '@angular/core';

APP_INITIALIZER is an OpaqueToken (or an InjectionToken since Angular 4) that references the ApplicationInitStatus service. ApplicationInitStatus is a multi provider. It supports multiple dependencies and you can use it in your providers list multiple times. It is used like this.

@NgModule({
  providers: [
    DictionaryService,
    {
      provide: APP_INITIALIZER,
      useFactory: (ds: DictionaryService) => () => return ds.load(),
      deps: [DictionaryService],
      multi: true
    }]
})
export class AppModule { }

This provider declaration tells the ApplicationInitStatus class to run the DictionaryService.load() method. load() returns a promise and ApplicationInitStatus blocks the app startup until the promise resolves. The load() function is defined like this.

load(): Promise<any> {
  return this.dataService.getDiscardReasons()
  .toPromise()
  .then(
    data => {
      this.dictionaries.set("DISCARD_REASONS",data);
    }
  )
}

Set up like that the dictionary gets loaded first and the other parts of the app can safely depend on it.

Edit: Be aware that this will increase the up-front load time for you app by however long the load() method takes. If you want to avoid that you could use a resolver on your route instead.

Move the logic in your SocketService constructor to a method instead and then call that in your main component's constructor or ngOnInit

SocketService

export class SocketService{
    init(){
        // Startup logic here
    }
}

App

import {SocketService} from './socket.service';
...
class App {
    constructor (private _socketService: SocketService) {
        _socketService.init();
    }
}
bootstrap(App, [SocketService]);

Also see APP_INITIALIZER, which is described as;

A function that will be executed when an application is initialized.