Spoiler
Sorry, the title is actually a lie. It takes 2 minutes of human work to get up and running, but you have to wait about 10 minutes in the middle for node modules to install. You can wander away during that long process, so we will politely pretend it really only takes 2 minutes.
Watch it happen
Explanation
For our Angular Boot Camp, we have been assisting lots of students as they configure their computer to work on Angular 2 projects. Recently we have been including the nascent Angular 2 CLI in this process. Either way though, installing the needed tools is fast and easy if you have a generic, off-the-shelf computer, with an extremely fast CPU and disk on an extremely fast network. It is less fast and easy if you are running on something like an older computer, with various old versions of software installed, and it can be quite painful on a locked down corporate computer.
To skip past this and start teaching our students Angular 2 with its CLI as quickly as possible, we sometimes suggest they try out Cloud 9. C9 is a web-based IDE; we are not affiliated with it in any way, other than as fans and customers. While we prefer more typical desktop IDEs (like VSCode and WebStorm) for most use, Cloud 9 is very useful for sharing a development session across the group of developers around the room or around the world. So it is a great tool to have in the toolbox.
To get up and running though, requires a few gymnastics. We have bundled up these gymnastics to a script which you can “source” into a Cloud 9 terminal window. See the video for details; here is the line of text you will need:
source <(curl -s https://angularbootcamp.com/c9a2cli)
As with any such command, there are security concerns. I don’t advocate running commands like this on your local computer, but if you’re running it in a freshly created throwaway Cloud 9 instance, security is not such a concern.
Downsides
There is currently one major downside of Cloud 9 for Angular 2 development: code completion, formatting, and other important IDE features are not yet available for Typescript in Cloud 9. The syntax highlighting works well but the other features have not yet arrived.