The Angular CLI is awesome, using it now makes working Angular a real joy. If you go back to version 1, without the CLI, it’s so hard to get back into the grove of not using it.
What I love about a CLI is how it has been designed to help you as a developer gets on doing your job. Unlike some other technologies, like .Net or Java the Angular Cli helps the developer without getting in your way.
We all know that the CLI helps you create components, services, pipes, modules and other classes we use in Angular. But one of the lesser known features of the CLI is the Stories that are in the GitHub repo. The great thing about these Stories is, they are small reminders for common things you may need to do when working with Angular, but you usually forget the specifics. So instead of trailing through Stack Overflow for an hour looking how to set up Angular Flex with CLI, you have the stories to help.
These stories are written by the Angular CLI team (though I think they can be added to by anyone who puts in a PR), showing you how you can do more with the CLI. For example how you add 3rd party libraries to your project or how to set you CSS processor of choice so every component you create is using that CSS processor.
There is also another story on how to add Bootstrap to a Cli built project. In the work, I do I use Bootstrap a lot for the UI of the web applications I’m developing. So this story is a real help. I can set up any new projects, add Bootstrap, and use Sass. All with a few changes to the .angular-cli.json file.
I think these angular stories are great. For me, they have proved to be a real help when I need a quick reminder of how to do something with the CLI.