Setting Up the Angular CLI Workspace

Previously, we learned what Angular is and why someone should choose it for web development. In this lesson, we will learn how to use it and start building great web applications.

Setting up a front-end project today is more cumbersome than ever. We used to manually include
the necessary JavaScript and CSS files in our HTML. Life used to be simple. Then, front-end development became more ambitious: we started splitting our code into modules and using special
tools called preprocessors for our code and CSS.

Our projects became more complicated, and we started to rely on build systems to bundle our applications. As developers, we are not huge fans of configuration—we want to focus on building awesome apps. However, modern browsers do more to support the latest web standards, and some have even started to support JavaScript modules. That said, this is far from being widely supported. In the meantime, we still have to rely on bundling and module support tools.

Project setup and management in Angular

Setting up a project with Angular can be tricky. We need to know what libraries to import and
ensure that files are processed in the correct order, which leads us to the topic of scaffolding. Scaffolder tools almost become necessary as complexity grows and every hour counts toward producing business value rather than being spent fighting configuration problems.

The primary motivation behind creating the Angular CLI was to help developers focus on application building, eliminating the configuration boilerplate. Essentially, with a simple command, we should be able to initialize an application, add new artifacts, run tests, and create a production-grade bundle. The Angular CLI supports all of this with the use of special commands. ...