Is angular-seed the de-facto empty project to start with?

I've found that though many people use various seed projects, the easiest & most consistent starting point for an angular app (or any javascript web app) is Yeoman.

This app is a scaffolding tool that allows you to specify generators which will build the up the kernel of your application, complete with whatever libraries you desire (via bower) and a working grunt build file (most generators come stock with a build task, server task for live editing, and testing task)

Though an app like this is necessarily opinionated, the scaffolding it produces is still very generic.

example:

mkdir my-app
cd my-app
npm install generator-angular
npm install generator-karma
yo angular

They all have different merits so it depends on what you are looking to do. I wrote angular-enterprise-seed and can speak to its relative merits.

1. It is server-agnostic. This is important since a core tenet of AngularJS, and one of many things that make it attractive, is that it follows the Client MVC paradigm. This means it is entirely decoupled from any and all server technologies. Many existing seeds tie AngularJS to server technologies, such as angular-sprout (NodeJS) or grilled-feta (Google App Engine/Java). In the case of the aforementioned projects, if NodeJS and/or Java environments aren't already on your system, then you will have to go through several hoops just to see the seed come up. This can be alienating to PHP and Python developers, which results in limiting the project's community.

2. Up and running in seconds. Because it is server-agnostic, it can be run in any container (heck the filesystem for that matter). Suggested method is running "python -m SimpleHTTPServer" from the root directory -- this comes native on Mac and Linux so there are no additional steps.

3. Live preview. It's cheap to check on status of the project because a live version is always hosted on github. Because it's server agnostic, this is automatically done by copying master to the gh-pages branch from a cron job.

4. Rich styling. It includes Twitter Bootstrap and custom/buildable LESS out of the box, along with Angular-UI, Angular-NG, fonts, and a myriad of other tools to provide rich styling and responsiveness capabilities.

5. Widgets. Like Angular-Seed and Angular-Sprout, Angular-Enterprise-Seed exemplifies "best practice" layout, routing, etc. But it also provides a host of pre-built components that can be taken off the shelf and immediately reused. This is a bit difficult to do as it can require the convergence of several technologies. For example, to create the grid example, I combined angular-ui, angular-ng, angular-js, and jquery styling. There are component examples for modals, pagination, alerts, grids, and more.

Angular-seed is great as an academic exercise if you want to learn how the pieces work, but it will leave you longing for a more substantial jump-off point.

I haven't used angular-sprout so I can't speak to its merits. Maybe there is some room to merge angular-sprout and angular-enterprise-seed?

I like using Yeoman as well. Try these to get a good scaffold:

npm install -g generator-angular  # install generator
yo angular                        # scaffold out a AngularJS project
bower install angular-ui          # install a dependency for your project from Bower
grunt test                        # test your app
grunt server                      # preview your app
grunt                             # build the application for deployment

I recognize that this is an older question, but it seems to have a fair number of views, so it makes sense to recommend what has recently become a very popular alternative to both Yeoman and angular-seed: ng-boilerplate. ng-boilerplate differs from angular-seed in that it's designed from the ground up for large production web apps, and therefore is a better solution than angular-seed in my opinion.

To explain the differences between the Yeoman and ng-boilerplate methods of app kickstarting, I'll quote ngbp's creator, Josh D. Miller:

Yeoman is awesome. But the problem I have with the generators for AngularJS is that they package by layer rather than by feature. If we store all controllers in a "controllers" folder and all services in a "services" folder, etc., and all our tests someplace else entirely, it can be quite challenging to reuse our components.

This is also pretty good discussion by Josh on the Yeoman angular-generator issues forum, that goes more in depth regarding the setup of ng-boilerplate vs. yeoman.

Just to be clear, Yeoman is not a generator. Yeoman is a format/system for making generators. There are several generators made with Yeoman that you can use to generate an AngularJS application. People often mistakenly refer to one or another of them as "the" Yeoman generator. But there are many. Confused yet? Yeoman isn't the only generator making system. Brunch is another one.

To answer your question, here is a very comprehensive side-by-side comparison of many AngularJS generators one can use to start making a web application with AngularJS. Currently, it contains over 200 different aspects of these things. One of them is file organization style. So you can easily see which ones organize the files by feature if that's important to you. It is to me.

There are still several of these left to be added. The two mentioned in this thread are new to me. But this comparison should give you a good idea of the options and how they compare. It's editable too, so if any of you are experts in any of these things, feel free to share what you know.

God only knows why people keep making more and more of these things instead of just helping to improve the existing ones. If you have any guesses, I would love to have that mystery solved.

EDIT: to gain access to the doc I ask that you either complete a questionnaire to share your knowledge of something or lobby the experts to do so.

Go here to do a questionnaire: http://www.dancancro.com/technology-questionnaires/