The Angular "getting started" guide points you at angular-seed on GitHub as a repository you can clone to start an Angular project.
Unfortunately, this hasn't been updated in two years and when I tried building it I got a lot of complaints about the "bower" package manager being deprecated, and how I should switch to "yarn" instead.
So I wondered how hard it would be to create a seed from scratch. After ensuring node and yarn were up to date, here's what you need to do:
1. Initialize the project and add angular
yarn init
yarn add angular
The first will prompt for a bunch of information about your project: name, author, version, etc.
2. Create an index.html file
I created a src subdirectory, and put the following HTML file in it:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html ng-app="app">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Demo</title>
</head>
<body>
<script src="../node_modules/angular/angular.js"></script>
<script src="app/app.module.js"></script>
</body>
</html>
This is entirely the wrong way to load scripts in production, but we haven't written a build system yet.
3. Create an application module
In src/app/app.module.js:
// app.module.js
(() => {
angular.module('app', [] );
})();
This creates the app-level module.
Congratulations! You have a perfectly empty Angular application! You can start adding components and modifying the template file from here.
A more realistic example
https://github.com/mgechev/angular-seed is a full-featured seed for Angular 2.
I found https://github.com/lackovic/angularjs-starter-kit more to my taste. It uses gulp as a build system and doesn't pull in anything else I don't understand. However, most Angular examples use TypeScript these days, so it might be better to use a seed that already uses the TypeScript compiler.