How to install Angular CLI locally (without the -g flag)

As some of the comments suggest, you can have a local and global version of angular cli on your system.

To be able to access your local version instead of global (lets say you have a different version installed locally then your global install) use npm run-script ng

for example npm run-script ng generate component SomeCoolComponent

check out this answer on github to a similar question: https://github.com/angular/angular-cli/issues/5955#issuecomment-320273493

TL;DR
Use a package called npx (run npm i -g npx if not already installed) and when you need to create an angular project, just use this command the very first time:
npx -p @angular/cli ng new hello-world-project

Explanation:
So For example if you want to create angular 4 project, modify the above command to include the angular-cli version 1.4.10 like this npx -p @angular/cli@1.4.10 ng new hello-world-project and then when your project setup is complete you can go back to using the normal ng generate and other commands.

Angular-cli versions indicate which angular version will be associatedwith a project & angular-cli 1.4.10 creates angular 4 projects

Edits:

Here is some useful versioning info about which cli creates which angular version.

 CLI version     Angular version 1.0 - 1.4.x       ^4.0.0 1.5.x             ^5.0.0 1.6.x - 1.7.x     ^5.2.0 6.x               ^6.0.0 7.x               ^7.0.0

Also, if you want to use latest stable version to create a certain angular project you can just use npx command like this npx -p @angular/cli@1.7 and it will use cli version 1.7.4 which is the most latest stable version for angular 5.

Check out this SO answer here where some other devs are trying to unfold this mystery.

Short Answer / TLTR

Start your project by specifying the package -p @angular/cli, so node can find the program:

npx -p @angular/cli ng new <project-name>

Long Answer

The npm ecosystem has been moving more and more towards installing tools as project-local devDependencies, instead of requiring users to install them globally. This is considered a good practice. As it allows to use multiple versions (one per project), instead of having one unique global version.

In order to start the project from scratch, you need to point to the package with -p flag (otherwise npx will not find it):

npx -p @angular/cli ng new <project-name>

- npx

npx is a command that is installed together with node and npm, starting version 5.2 (July 2017). Most probably you already have it installed.

npx allows you to run that npm command without having it installed locally. npx will look for the latest version of the specified package (in this case @angular/cli) and run the command ng from the bin folder.

- specific versions

You could also install a specific version of Angular CLI. For example, let's say we need to install version 9.1. We could run:

npx -p @angular/cli@9.1 ng new <project-name>

- once it is installed

After the Angular CLI installs the project, go to the folder and use the npx ng directly. For example:

npx ng serve

This will search inside the node_modules/.bin/ folder for the ng command, which is a soft link pointing to ../@angular/cli/bin/ng, the locally installed ng command.

Links

• npx
• Angular CLI