I have freshly installed angular-cli 1.0.0.beta.17 (latest one), start new project, able to serve project on port 4200 with no problems - just standard \"app works!\" message.>
There are a lot of commands to build the angular application to production mode using angular cli.
ng build --env=prod
Once you will execute this command on cmd dist default folder will create that will contain all the minified files related to prod build, but it will not set the base path in the index.html. To change in index.html either go and do the manual change like adding the (.) ie.
You can also pass the parameter while building the code in prod mode using angular/CLI command.
ng build --base-href=./ --env=prod
There are other commands as well to build like passing the AOT and build-optimizer ( to reduce bundle sizes).
ng build --prod --build-optimizer
If you want to change the default folder name (dist) after build then you can change the outDir value in the .angular-cli.json.