Converting an existing angular 2 project to use angular CLI

Question

I have a project that was not created using ng new (rather, I followed the quickstart guide). When I run an angular CLI command in that project (such as ng generate) I get this error message:

You have to be inside an angular-cli project in order to use the generate command.

Is there a way I can turn my existing project into an angular-cli project? (I wanted to try using it because it apparently automatically works around an issue with barrel imports and SystemJS.)

Answer 1

You should be able to run ng init and follow the prompts. Have a look at this issue if you need some guidance: https://github.com/angular/angular-cli/issues/755

Edit (March 13, 2017):

ng-init was removed from the latest version of the angular cli. https://github.com/angular/angular-cli/pull/4628

So for now you'll need to resort to mimicking what it tried to accomplish. ie:

1. Create a new angular project ng new myTemplate

2. Copy relevant files to your existing project from your new myTemplate project:

   .angular-cli.json package.json tslint.json src/polyfills.ts src/styles.css src/tsconfig.json

Depending on the state of your existing application you may want to copy over way more or way less. I guess this is why the feature was removed from the CLI. There isn't really any way for it to know exactly what you want it to do.

Answer 2

ng init has been removed. What worked for me was to manually create a .angular-cli.json file in the root folder with the following keys:

 {     "$schema": "./node_modules/@angular/cli/lib/config/schema.json",     "project": {       "version": "1.0.0",       "name": "new-cli"     },     "apps": [       {         "root": "src",         "outDir": "dist",         "assets": [           "assets"         ],         "index": "index.html",         "main": "main.ts",         "polyfills": "polyfills.ts",          "prefix": "app",         "scripts": [],         "environmentSource": "environments/environment.ts"       }     ]   } 

You will have to change values according to your setup of course.