You need to install Ionic and its dependencies to get started. Ionic itself is just a collection of CSS styles, Angular components, and standard Cordova plugins. It's also a command-line tool to help manage all technologies, such as Cordova. The installation process will give you a command line to generate the initial code and build the app.
Ionic uses npm as the installer, which is included when installing Node.js. Please install the latest version of Node.js from https://nodejs.org/en/download/.
You will need to install cordova, ios-sim (an iOS Simulator) and ionic:
$ npm install -g cordova ionic ios-sim
You can install all three components with this single command line instead of issuing three command lines separately. The -g parameter is to install the package globally (not just in the current directory).
For Linux and Mac, you may need to use the sudo command to allow system access, as shown:
$ sudo npm install -g cordova ionic ios-sim
The following are a few common options for an integrated development environment (IDE):
- Xcode for iOS
- Android Studio for Android
- Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code)
- JetBrains' WebStorm
- Sublime Text (http://www.sublimetext.com/) for web development
All of these have a free license. You could code directly in Xcode or Android Studio, but those are somewhat heavy-duty for web apps, especially when you have a lot of windows open and just need something simple to code. Sublime Text is free for non-commercial developers, but you have to purchase a license if you are a commercial developer. Most frontend developers would prefer to use Sublime Text for coding HTML and JavaScript, because it's very lightweight and comes with a well-supported developer community. Sublime Text has been around for a long time and is very user-friendly. However, there are many features in Ionic that make Visual Studio Code very compelling. For example, it has the look and feel of a full IDE without being bulky. You could debug JavaScript directly inside VS Code, as well as getting autocomplete (for example, IntelliSense). The following instructions cover both Sublime Text and VS Code, although the rest of this book will use VS Code.