Many moving parts are involved in any Angular project, and the Angular CLI (Command Line Interface) is a new tool that makes it easy to get projects started, generate components, routes or services, serve your projects and to run tests.

This post covers Angular 2 and up.

Installing the Angular CLI

The first step is to install it from npm:

$ npm install -g @angular/cli

This will install the Angular CLI globally. If npm complains, then try running the command with sudo:

$ sudo npm install -g @angular/cli

Starting a new project

First use your terminal to navigate to a directory that will be the parent directory of your project, then run this command:

$ ng new app-name

This will create an Angular project with everything in place for your to get started coding right away! Here’s an example of how the directory structure of your new project will look like:

├── README.md
├── angular-cli.json
├── **e2e …**
├── karma.conf.js
├── **node\_modules …**
├── package.json
├── protractor.conf.js
├── **src …**
└── tslint.json

Serving your project

This will run a local server at http://localhost:4200 by default. It will also watch for changes in your project and refresh the page automatically. Run this command from within the project directory:

$ ng serve

ng generate

Use ng generate to generate useful things for your project like components, routes, pipes, services and directives. For example, here’s how you would generate a component:

$ ng generate component path/component-name

Running tests

Finally, run your tests with ng test:

$ ng test