To answer your question, let's assume that you are interested in a specific angular version and NOT in a specific angular-cli version (angular-cli is just a tool after all).

A reasonnable move is to keep your angular-cli version alligned with your angular version, otherwise you risk to stumble into incompatibilities issues. So getting the correct angular-cli version will lead you to getting the desired angular version.

From that assumption, your question is not about angular-cli, but about npm.

Here is the way to go:

[STEP 0 - OPTIONAL] If you're not sure of the angular-cli version installed in your environment, uninstall it.

npm uninstall -g @angular/cli

Then, run (--force flag might be required)

npm cache clean

or, if you're using npm > 5.

npm cache verify

[STEP 1] Install an angular-cli specific version

npm install -g @angular/cli@wished.version.here

[STEP 2] Create a project

ng new you-app-name

The resulting white app will be created in the desired angular version.

NOTE: I have not found any page displaying the compatibility matrix of angular and angular-cli. So I guess the only way to know what angular-cli version should be installed is to try various versions, create a new project and checkout the package.json to see which angular version is used.

angular versions changelog Here is the changelog from github reposition, where you can check available versions and the differences.

Hope it helps

You can just have package.json with specific version and do npm install and it will install that version.

Also you don't need to depend on angular-cli to develop your project.

Edit #2 ( 7/2/2017)

If you install the angular cli right now, you'd probably have the new name of angular cli which is @angular/cli, so you need to uninstall it using

npm uninstall -g @angular/cli

and follow the code above. I'm still getting upvotes for this so I updated my answer for those who want to use the older version for some reasons.

Edit #1

If you really want to create a new project with previous version of Angular using the cli, try to downgrade the angular-cli before the final release. Something like:

npm uninstall -g angular-cli
npm cache clean
npm install -g angular-cli@1.0.0-beta.32

Initial

You can change the version of the angular in the package.json . I'm guessing you want to use older version of angular but I suggest you use the latest version. Using:

ng new app-name

will always use the latest version of angular.