Ionic CLI

The Ionic CLI is the primary tool used during the process of developing an Ionic app. It’s like a Swiss Army Knife: It brings together a bunch of miscellaneous tools under a single interface. The CLI contains a number of commands crucial for Ionic development, such as start, build, serve, and run. It also contains commands like emulate and info, which can be helpful in certain situations.

Installing the CLI

To install the CLI, you will need to first install node and npm. Note: The CLI requires Node 4.X (Node 5.X has been know to cause a number of issues). Once installed, run the following command to get the latest version of the Ionic CLI:

$ npm install -g ionic@beta

On Mac and Linux, you’ll need to add sudo to install Ionic globally:

$ sudo npm install -g ionic@beta

Basic Usage

One of the most important commands is the start command, which creates a new Ionic project. Let’s try it out:

$ ionic start myAwesomeApp --v2

This will create a new app named myAwesomeApp. Let’s cd in to that directory, and run another Ionic CLI command:

$ ionic info

This should print out details about your Ionic environment, which is useful for debugging. Finally, to view your app in the browser, you can use the serve command:

$ ionic serve

Next Steps

Now that you’ve got the basics down, check out the menu on the left for a full list of commands. If you prefer to use the command line, you can see the full list of commands and options by simply typing ionic.