What does --minimal do in angular-cli `ng new`?

Question

The Angular CLI has an option called --minimal. What does it do and where is it documented? The command ng help new says very little about it

--minimal (Boolean) (Default: false) Should create a minimal app.   aliases: --minimal 

Answer 1

Current as of July 31, 2017 A regular angular app generates 5 directories, 26 files. A --minimal generates 4 directories, 13 files. The difference? --minimal excludes generation of multiple files by enabling some other options.

• You can see this in the code here
  • --skip-tests: stops the generation of testing (viz. e2e, karma.conf.js, protractor.conf.js, and *.spec. files) including tsconfig.spec.json, app.component.spec.ts
  • --inline-style: stops the generation of external css stubs instead keeping an empty string in the .ts file.
  • --inline-template: stops the generation of external html instead keeping it in the template variable in the .ts file.
• Stops the generation of the following files, code here
  • README.md
  • tsconfig and tslint
  • favicon.ico

Here are the example's generated without --minimal

my-app/ ├── e2e │   ├── app.e2e-spec.ts │   ├── app.po.ts │   └── tsconfig.e2e.json ├── karma.conf.js ├── package.json ├── package-lock.json ├── protractor.conf.js ├── README.md ├── src │   ├── app │   │   ├── app.component.css │   │   ├── app.component.html │   │   ├── app.component.spec.ts │   │   ├── app.component.ts │   │   └── app.module.ts │   ├── assets │   ├── environments │   │   ├── environment.prod.ts │   │   └── environment.ts │   ├── favicon.ico │   ├── index.html │   ├── main.ts │   ├── polyfills.ts │   ├── styles.css │   ├── test.ts │   ├── tsconfig.app.json │   ├── tsconfig.spec.json │   └── typings.d.ts ├── tsconfig.json └── tslint.json 

--minimal does the following

├── package.json ├── package-lock.json ├── src │   ├── app │   │   ├── app.component.ts │   │   └── app.module.ts │   ├── assets │   ├── environments │   │   ├── environment.prod.ts │   │   └── environment.ts │   ├── index.html │   ├── main.ts │   ├── polyfills.ts │   ├── styles.css │   ├── tsconfig.app.json │   └── typings.d.ts └── tsconfig.json