Installing the Angular CLI

npm install -g @angular/cli@latest

+ @angular/cli@1.7.3 added 314 packages, removed 203 packages, updated 170 packages and moved 7 packages in 123.346s

The number of packages removed and updated and the Angular CLI version may be different. Don't worry.

2. You can remove your old version of the Angular CLI and install the latest version with the following commands:

npm uninstall -g angular-cli
npm cache verify
npm install -g @angular/cli@latest

Note that the preceding command will install the Angular CLI globally on your environment/machine. Frequently, when we develop using the Angular framework and the Angular CLI, we see warning messages about the differences between versions. This means that, even if you have installed the latest version of the Angular CLI in your environment, the Angular CLI will check the version used in the current project and compare it to the version installed on your machine, and will use the current project version.

This is very useful when you work on third-party projects and need to keep dependencies consistency between the globally Angular CLI installed on your machine and the local project version installed on node_modules project folder.

3. Inside of your current Angular project, type the following commands:

rm -rf node_modules
npm uninstall --save-dev angular-cli
npm install --save-dev @angular/cli@latest
npm install

Like the other commands that we are using in our book, the Angular CLI has a command called ng help. With it, we can access a vast list of options.

One of these commands is particularly useful when we are developing applications with Angular and need to consult something in the official documentation, without leaving the Terminal.

4. Go back to your Terminal and type the following command:

ng doc HttpClient

The preceding command will open your default browser right at the HttpClient documentation API, using https://angular.io/api?query=HttpClient. So, you can combine the ng doc command with anything from the API that you want to search.

We now have everything we need to start developing web applications using the Angular CLI, but, before we get deeper into building a sample application, we're going to update our toolkit with some very useful tools.