Combating AngularJS executing controller twice

The app router specified navigation to MyController like so:

$routeProvider.when('/',
                   { templateUrl: 'pages/home.html',
                     controller: MyController });

But I also had this in home.html:

<div data-ng-controller="MyController">

This digested the controller twice. Removing the data-ng-controller attribute from the HTML resolved the issue. Alternatively, the controller: property could have been removed from the routing directive.

This problem also appears when using tabbed navigation. For example, app.js might contain:

  .state('tab.reports', {
    url: '/reports',
    views: {
      'tab-reports': {
        templateUrl: 'templates/tab-reports.html',
        controller: 'ReportsCtrl'
      }
    }
  })

The corresponding reports tab HTML might resemble:

<ion-view view-title="Reports">
  <ion-content ng-controller="ReportsCtrl">

This will also result in running the controller twice.

AngularJS docs - ngController
Note that you can also attach controllers to the DOM by declaring it in a route definition via the $route service. A common mistake is to declare the controller again using ng-controller in the template itself. This will cause the controller to be attached and executed twice.

When you use ngRoute with the ng-view directive, the controller gets attached to that dom element by default (or ui-view if you use ui-router). So you will not need to attach it again in the template.

I just went through this, but the issue was different from the accepted answer. I'm really leaving this here for my future self, to include the steps I went through to fix it.

1. Remove redundant controller declarations
2. Check trailing slashes in routes
3. Check for ng-ifs
4. Check for any unnecessary wrapping ng-view calls (I accidentally had left in an ng-view that was wrapping my actual ng-view. This resulted in three calls to my controllers.)
5. If you are on Rails, you should remove the turbolinks gem from your application.js file. I wasted a whole day to discover that. Found answer here.
6. Initializing the app twice with ng-app and with bootstrap. Combating AngularJS executing controller twice
7. When using $compile on whole element in 'link'-function of directive that also has its own controller defined and uses callbacks of this controller in template via ng-click etc. Found answer here.