Today, we are releasing the public beta for Ionic Lab!
Ionic Lab is the result of our first experiment with the Ionic Lab concept, combined with the Ionic CLI, which gives developers an easy way to start, build, run, and emulate Ionic apps – as well as integrate them with the Ionic Platform (more on that later).
The CLI itself has been incredibly popular with Ionic devs, specifically those who prefer a terminal-based workflow. Every month, the Ionic CLI is installed over 130,000 times!
But we want Ionic’s toolchain to be a great experience for those who don’t typically use command line tools, too, so we’ve combined the CLI’s functionality into an easy-to-use interface that we think you’re really going to love.
Like the Ionic CLI, Ionic Lab makes it super easy for developers to get up and running with an Ionic project and all the aspects of the development cycle that follow: starting, building, emulating, uploading, and viewing apps; running apps on physical devices; and sharing apps with other users.
And, as usual, we invested heavily in the web platform to create Ionic Lab.
Using the same technology that runs Atom text editor, Electron, we created the entire application by dogfooding the Ionic SDK itself with a few node modules to assist. Go ahead and take a peek under the hood; you’ll see Ionic controllers, services, and state managing the application!
Getting Started with Ionic Lab
To get started with Ionic Lab, download the Mac app (Windows coming soon!), and move it to your Applications folder:
Start the app, and you’ll be greeted by the welcome screen. You can then drag and drop your existing Ionic applications into Ionic Lab or start a brand new project.
Once you select your Ionic app from the left app sidebar, you’ll see options in the middle pane that let you serve, emulate, run, build, upload, or share your application.
To view your Ionic app in Ionic Lab, hit the ‘serve’ button. You’ll see a preview of your app on the right. Above the app are two tabs, ‘iOS’ and ‘Android’. You can toggle between the platforms to see how your app will look on an iOS or Android device.
You can also access logs for your app at any time from the icon in the upper right of the application. This really comes in handy, especially when you need to see what went wrong.
Next Steps
We’re really excited about the evolution of Lab and what’s in store for it going forward. In the immediate future, our focus will be on stabilizing Ionic Lab for all Mac OSX and Windows users. We also plan to allow users to customize settings for Ionic apps (serve port, live reload port, watching locations).
Eventually, we’ll be including a one-click system setup (Android, Xcode, etc.), integrated Cordova plugin searching and validation, additional preview options (resizing app size, side-by-side views, and orientation), and the ability to customize platform settings (Crosswalk for Android, WKWebView for iOS).
Our other future plans include:
- Ionic resources generation for icons and splash screens
- Build options for release: concatenation, uglification, updating HTML for references to assets
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Saving and restoring Ionic application setup
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Integrated documentation
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Ionic Platform integration for push notifications and the ability to specify deploy to device based on upload
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Ionic Creator integration
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Ionic View live previewing
Please let us know what you think about Ionic Lab! Remember, it’s still in beta, and you may run across a bug or two. Please file any bugs or issues you find here!
As always, if you have any crazy ideas about how to make it even better, let us know!
96 Comments
windows beta would be great -get busy ionicers!
We’re working on it! 🙂
You bet. We’ll have it out *very* soon.
Oh my God! You guys are unstoppable. Thanks a lot for pushing so hard to make developers’ life easier with such amazing tools like this one. ?
You’re welcome. That’s our goal!
Wow amazing, you guys are making mobile app dev as fun as anything I’ve developed with in the last decade. Thanks for all the crazy hard work
You’re welcome. Thanks for the kind words of appreciation. We’ll keep rocking it.
You guys are just spoiling us over here. Please never stop!
Thanks for the kind words! We’re doing our best 🙂
Okay… so I’m super excited about Lab, but what I really want to know is: when is the update coming to Ionic that will incorporate desktop development via Elektron like you did here?
Bravo, Ionic. Bravo.
Electron will be supported in Ionic 2 🙂
That is even MORE exciting… Would love to be able to create cross platform *desktop* apps using Ionic… From what I have seen of Electron and its capabilities, it ROCKS!
Can’t wait!
Thanks for the words of appreciation. As our ongoing commitment to open source, we’ll be contributing back to cordova to patch some issues we came across when using Electron with Cordova as well. Cheers!
Awesome!
Thanks!
Is Lab compatible with apps created with Grunt, when the source is based in the app folder? Any chance of a grunt serve button?
Awesome release, thank you guys! Keep going
Thanks for the words of appreciation. We’ll keep it up.
Coolness. Will this Ionic Lab becomes a paid app in future?
Not in the foreseeable future!
Thanks a lot for your work.
You bet. Thanks for the support.
And linux?! Is there any hope for us to get this tool?
+1, Linux please
We’ll def be looking into it.
+1
+1, Linux please…
+1
Yeah, we want it for Linux. +1
+1 For a Linux version
+ 1
+1 for linux
+1 => There are a lot of developers working with Linux. Please, think of them
We support it now, go to lab.ionic.io 🙂
Wow! You guys are straight up awesome!
Thanks! We’re doing our best.
Nice work ! Many thanks 😉
You bet. Thanks for the appreciation and support.
Excelent!!! thank’s!!!
You’re welcome, thank you! 🙂
Awesome guys!
Take the next step to be competitor of Telerik Platform (App Builder) and Intel NDK
We’re just trying to make tools to make our users happy 🙂
Can’t wait to try this tool on Windows!
Coming soon, we’re working on it!
This is totally amazing stuff. I just switched over to using Atom as my main editor too. Wouldn’t it be superb if Ionic Lab could be integrated directly into Atom as a package? Killer IDE! 😉
I’ll redact my comment – I just noticed the ‘Open app in Atom’ menu option within Lab, which is close enough for me! 😉
Winning! Thanks for the kind words of appreciation.
Ionic runs on Linux, The Ionic Lab should too!
Great job!
You bet, I’ll be looking at that!
Feature request: IDE integration within Ionic Lab so everything I do is within Ionic Lab. Maybe integrate Atom right into Lab. That would be super cool!
Yep, great suggestion. I’ll be looking more into that!
This is great stuff. Lab for linux would be awesome. 🙂
It’s definitely in the future. 🙂
Hi am using Ubuntu system, can you please send Ionic lab app for Ubuntu system. I am eagerly waiting to use the Ionic lab
Thanks,
Anil Kumar
Any idea about when can we expect for Windows
We’re working on it right now. Hoping for end of this week or next week.
Simply Amazing
Thank you!
That looks really great and “next steps” are very promising ! 🙂 One feature request (if not already in it), the possibility to manage updates of Ionic Lib, and then plugins 🙂
We’ll add those to the roadmap. Thanks for the suggestions.
Oh man. this is crazy. I was thinking about creating something like lab couple of days back as I don’t like working with the cli and today BOOM! you guys are awesome.
Thanks for the words of encouragement 🙂
No iPad view?
Additional view options are coming. Some of those will be iPad, Nexus, etc.
That’s awesome, great work. If support for setting up ngCordova is added I’d probably use this almost exclusively (one click installation of the 60+ ngCordova plugins would be sweet!)
Thanks for the suggestion. It’s in the roadmap. It’s still Beta (work in progress).
Great idea! Finally guys who knows command-line tools is great, but buttons for those who prefer it is even better. I was thinking I hate CLI, but ionic CLI is one of the exceptions since it is very well done. This UI seems even greater.
When will we have plugins for IDEs like WebStorm, Visual Studio…? 😀
Some of these features (Ionic Creator <3 just discovered it, seems great) would definitely integrate well in IDEs. It would boost Ionic even more, and help to compete with the toolset native apps seems to already have 🙂
(I am also discovering Android Studio with current version, I must admit they did a great job with it.)
Can’t wait for the Windows version, GJ!
Linux?
You are the best ! 😉
Is it possible to modify the js, html, css and all the files into Ionic Lab?? Anyway congratulations!!!
How about using marketplace starters as an app type?
It doesn’t seem too difficult to make it work on Linux. It just requires electron and a couple of commands in the terminal.
Great Works! Greetings from istanbul, Türkiye.
ersineser,
Guys, why no Linux support?
<3
nooo i dont hv mac T__T
Any specific release date for the windows version?
Is there an approximate date of the windows release? Can’t wait for such great tool!
this is right, but, can you add an IDE to code there while im watching the results in same window, it will be very useful
where is windows? 🙁
I was eager waiting the Windows version. Thanks!!
Oh man, I remember reading about this a year ago and thinking how cool it would be. Unfortunately, I don’t develop mobile apps anymore but I will keep this in mind if opportunity ever arises!
yes absolutly. linux too. Hopefully before years end no???
Looks like a web version would be possible.
Add cloud build for iOS/Android/WP and we’re finally platform independent.
Anytime soon?
really nice! quite used to the CLI, but this just makes things really cool and simple. Might start using this instead of the CLI.
THANK YOU!!!!
How can I now use cordova bluetoothserial plugin with htis?
would love to see this on linux.
seriously – it’s 2015 and everyone is leaving comments saying “wow you guys are killing it” all because you provided a GUI interface??? If this was the early 90’s when GUI’s was the new hotness then I could understand all the fervor but again – IT’S 2015!! This should be a given for any product and it seriously shouldn’t have taken this long (matter of fact it should have been there from the start). So forgive me for not jumping on the “you guys rock” bandwagon. Ionic is an awesome product but we shouldn’t have to wait and plead for GUI’s.
Well, you don’t have to wait and plead, since it’s out 😛
Something interesting happened in the last several years, probably related to OS X gaining such large dev share: the CLI came into vogue. It’s not so cut and dry anymore.
At any rate, these things take time to build, no matter what. We started with the CLI and now we have a GUI, so that should make both sides happy.
I love ionic framework and the new ionic Lab too. However, I am unable to use ionic Lab within a corporate network that mandates the use of http/https proxy. Please add support for http proxy.
error downloading ionic lab……..i cant download ionic lab for windows…….
error downloading because timeout……….
please help me out…………i die trying to download ionic with command tool…………….its my last try………………
Please allow for vertical scrolling for those using smaller displays. Parts of the app are unusable.
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