Mobile App Development with Ionic 2, 1st Edition

Chapter 2. Setting Up Our Development Environment

One of the initial challenges in developing with the Ionic Framework is the installation and setup of the several tools that Ionic requires. In this chapter, we will walk you through the process of installing all the necessary components and configurations for developing Ionic applications. The installation process can be broken down into to two main parts: the base Ionic installation, and the platform-specific SDK installations. The base installation will cover just the tools that you need to generate your first Ionic application and preview it in your browser. If you want to dive right in and start developing with Ionic, then this is all you will need to do. The second portion of the installation is about setting up your native development environment(s). Even though we are building our apps with web technologies, we will still need to have the native development environments installed on our computers. This will give us access to the emulators, as well as the ability to deploy and test the applications on our devices, and eventually submit them to the app stores.

Throughout this book, we will be using the command line to use the Ionic CLI. On macOS, we will be using the Terminal application. We recommend adding either a shortcut on the desktop or adding it to your Dock. If you are developing on a PC, I personally recommend using Git Bash (which can be installed when we install Git) instead of the default command prompt. Its ...