Ionic Framework

Windows

There are two paths you can take to set up a Windows machine. One is installing all the dependencies one by one, and the other is installing the Tools for Cordova plugin for Visual Studio 2015. We go over the process of using the Visual Studio installer in our blog.

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 Chocolatey package manager

Once installed, you should have access to both node and npm from your command line.

iOS

The iOS SDK does not run on Windows, so nothing to do here. Still want to build for iOS, though? Check out Package, part of the Ionic Cloud.

Java JDK

We’ll need to download and install Java JDK 8 from their website.

Android SDK

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.

If you don’t want to download Android Studio you can just download the Android SDK files for Windows here

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.

Gradle

If you install the Android SDK without ANdroid Studio you have to install Gradle seperatly. Download Gradle from the offical Gradle website

Environment Variables

Now that everything’s installed, we’ll need to set some environment variables for our command line. From the startmenu, search for “System Environment Variables”. From here, we’ll update the user variable PATH and create a new variable of ANDROID_HOME

ANDROID_HOME : The path to where the Android SDK is installed.
PATH : Two entries, one where Tools are installed for the Android SDK, and another for Platform tools
GRADLE_HOME : The path to where gradle is installed

Or set them with the Windows Command Line

set ANDROID_HOME=C:\<installation location>\sdk
set PATH=%PATH%;%ANDROID_HOME%\tools;%ANDROID_HOME%\platform-tools
set GRADLE_HOME=C:\<installation location>

From here, we should be able to run

# check Java version
java -version

# start the Android SDK manager
android

Now, you should be able to create and build an Android project from the command line.

Windows Universal Apps

To build apps for Windows Universal, download and install Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition. During the installation, Select “Tools for Cross Platform Development” as well as the SDK for Windows Universal Apps.

With everything installed, you’ll be able to add a windows platform from the command line with this command:

ionic cordova platform add windows

By default the build command produces two packages: Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1, which Ionic does not support. To upgrade Windows package to version 10 the following configuration setting must be added to configuration file (config.xml).

<preference name="windows-target-version" value="10.0" />