OSX
Common Tools
For the most part, Node and NPM are going to be used extensively for Ionic and Cordova. You can use the installer from the Node website or various package managers.
Once installed, you should have access to both node
and npm
from your command line.
iOS
You’ll want to install Xcode from Apple. You can either do this from the Mac App store or from Apple’s Developer portal. The Mac App store is the easiest approach. Once XCode is installed, you’ll have XCode, the iOS SDK, XCode command line tools, and all the build tools to output a native app.
Java
You’ll need to download Java from their website. The install puts Java in your /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/
folder, so navigate there and pick the version of Java you’ve installed. Copy this location (including the version number) as we’ll need it for later.
Android
Download Android Studio and go through the installer and set up the IDE. It should print out a location for where the Android SDK gets installed; copy this down for future use.
Next, inside the new SDK
location, we’ll run tools/android
to open the Android SDK Manager. We’ll want to install:
- Android Platform SDK for your targeted version of Android
- Android Platform-Tools
- Android SDK build-tools version 19.1.0 or higher
- Android Support Repository (found under “Extras”)
Accept the license and let the packages install.
Environment Variables
Now that everything’s installed, we’ll need to set some environment variables for our command line. Open your terminal and enter the following:
touch .bash_profile
Then open that file in your favorite editor.
From here, we’ll need to add a few lines. These are the reference to Java and the Android SDK location we copied down earlier.
If you’ve used the paths suggested, you should have something like this.
# Create a JAVA_HOME Variable, use, the name of the JDK folder
export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/{replaceWithYourJavaVersion}/Contents/Home
# Add that to the global PATH variable
export PATH=${JAVA_HOME}/bin:$PATH
# Add the Android SDK to the PATH variable
export PATH=${PATH}:~/Library/Android/sdk/tools:~/Library/Android/sdk/platform-tools
From here, we can quit the terminal and then start it back up again. If there are no errors, you should be able to run
# check java version
java -version
# start android SDK manager
android
Now, you should be able to create and build an Android project from the command line.