If you prefer to not get coupled with the CLI tool, there are a lot of starter projects developed by the community that can provide a great starting point for your next Angular project.
If you enjoy static typing, you can give the angular-seed project a try. It is hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/mgechev/angular-seed .
The Angular Seed provides the following key features:
Easy for extend, modular, and statically typed build systems.
AoT compilation support.
Supports multiple Angular applications with a shared code base in a single instance of the seed.
Production and development builds.
Sample unit tests with Jasmine and Karma.
End-to-end tests with Protractor.
A development server with LiveReload.
Uses codelyzer for static code analysis, which verifies that your project follows the Angular style guide to some extent.
Follows the best practices for your applications' and files' organization.
Manager for the TypeScript-related type definitions.
Provides full Docker...