I have installed Angular CLI package separately using npm:
npm install --save-dev @angular/cli@latest
When I try to use commands cli<
I got this same error in my current project and was confused because I'm running the application / ng serve in one terminal, but got this when I tried to generate a component from another terminal. .angular-cli.json was already there and correct. So what gives?
I realized that I used the shortcut to open VisualStudio Code's internal terminal -- which opened the terminal to the *root of the project * (like most IDEs). The project contains other things in addition to the Angular application folder that has the .angular-cli.json file in question. I just had to cd to the right folder and run ng g c again and things were fine.
In my case it was just a silly error. I thought I'd come back to share in order to save people a real headache for something so simple. I see that Shiva actually has mentioned this above, but I thought I would give a bit more detail so it doesn't get overlooked.