Installing Cordova and Ionic CLI

Finally, to complete the Ionic 2 setup, we will install the Ionic and Cordova CLI. Ionic CLI is a wrapper around the Cordova CLI with some additional features.

All the code examples in this book use Cordova version 6.4.0, Ionic CLI version 2.1.14, and Ionic version 2.1.17. But the same should work with latest version of Ionic as well.

To install the Ionic CLI, run the following command:

npm install -g ionic cordova

To verify the install, run the following command:

cordova -v
> 6.4.0

You can also run this command:

ionic -v
> 2.1.14

You can run the following command to get the complete information regarding the Ionic setup:

ionic info

Your system information:
Cordova CLI: 6.4.0 
Ionic CLI Version: 2.1.14
Ionic App Lib Version: 2.1.7
ios-deploy version: 1.8.4 
ios-sim version: 5.0.6 
OS: macOS Sierra
Node Version: v6.10.1
Xcode version: Xcode 8.3 Build version 8E162

If you see an Ionic CLI version greater than or equal to 2.2.2, you have an Ionic CLI that can work with Ionic 3 apps. Nonetheless, the commands and examples in this book will work the same way.

To get a feel of what Ionic CLI is packed with, run the following:

 ionic

We should see a list of tasks, as seen in the following screenshot:

There are a few more tasks apart from the ones seen in the preceding screenshot.

We can read through the tasks and explanations to get an idea about what they do. Also, note that some of the tasks are still in beta, as of today.

With this, we have completed the installation of all the software needed to develop apps using Ionic.