Overview
Welcome! Ionic is a powerful HTML5 SDK that helps you build native-feeling mobile apps using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
Ionic is focused mainly on the look and feel, and UI interaction of your app. That means we aren't a replacement for PhoneGap or your favorite Javascript framework. Instead, Ionic simply fits in well with these projects in order to simplify one big part of your app: the front end. We recommend reading Where does the Ionic Framework fit in? to get a good understanding of Ionic's goals.
Ionic currently requires AngularJS in order to work at its full potential. While you can still use the CSS portion of the framework, you'll miss out on powerful UI interactions, gestures, animations, and other things.
We will be releasing Cordova/PhoneGap plugins in the future to expand the capabilities of your apps.
Download
Download the latest official release of Ionic and get started!
- Latest Version: 1.3.0 "delhi"
- Released: 2016-04-21
You can also clone it on GitHub to get the bleeding edge release. Additionally, all of our previous releases can also be found on Github.
Command Line Utility and Seed Project
We have a node.js utility that can be used to quickly start an Ionic project. We are working to build out the functionality of this tool, but right now you can quickly create a project with our seed project by doing:
$ npm install -g ionic
$ ionic start myproject
You can also clone the seed project itself, which gives you everything you need to build Ionic apps with Cordova and AngularJS.
What's Included
Ionic comes with compiled Javascript and CSS for your app, optional Sass files and JS Framework extensions, along with a great icon pack.
CSS/Sass
The CSS can stand on its own, but it is also built to be enhanced by the developer. For simplicity, you can always just add in your own CSS and override default properties. And for even more power and flexibility, the core is written with Sass and includes easily customized variables and mixins. While the default design is similar to iOS, we feel we’ve left the CSS in a state which can be easily extended to get your own look and feel.
Cordova/PhoneGap/Trigger.io
To add Ionic to your Cordova, PhoneGap, or Trigger.io project, just reference the Ionic CSS and JS files from the web root of your app.
The CSS and JS files can be found in the ionic-sdk npm package. You can also download them directly at http://code.ionicframework.com/ or in the github repo: https://github.com/driftyco/ionic. The release directory will have the files you need: https://github.com/driftyco/ionic/tree/master/release. The "Manual Start" section of the README also goes through some other ways to install.
Browser Support
Ionic is focused on building native/hybrid mobile apps rather than mobile websites.
As such, our browser support tends to be whatever Web View API is available to native apps on a given platform. For Ionic 1.3.0 "delhi", that means UIWebView for iOS 7+, and Android 4.1 and up. Windows Phone and FirefoxOS support is on our roadmap.
License
Ionic is an open source SDK released under a permissive MIT license. This means you can use Ionic in your own personal or commercial projects for free. MIT is the same license used by such popular projects as jQuery and Ruby on Rails.
The website content here (found in the ionic-site repo) is under the Apache 2 license.
Contribute to Ionic Development
We'd love to have you help improve Ionic, whether it's improving the framework's code, or touching up the documentation. For more information on contributing, check out our Contributor Guide.
About Ionic
Ionic was built by @benjsperry, @adamdbradley, and @maxlynch at Drifty, an independent bootstrapped software company and makers of such fine products as Codiqa and Jetstrap.
Ionic was built to take HTML5 on mobile into the future. We wanted a mobile development SDK that not only looked and worked great, but was also powerful enough to build the amazing apps the best developers were creating. HTML5's time has arrived. Ionic proves it.