I just want to point out that you don’t necessarily need aurelia-cli to run your test. You just need to setup the karma, webpack, and jasmine correctly.
This repo is an example a working setup. Pay special attention to the karma.conf.js, tests/karma-bundle.js, and tests/webpack.config.js (based on the generated project by aurelia-cli). Note that this is just an example, and you can modify the dependencies as per your need.