Ionic App Scripts

Helper scripts to get Ionic apps up and running quickly (minus the config overload).

To get the latest @ionic/app-scripts, please run:

npm install @ionic/app-scripts@latest --save-dev

Config Defaults

Out of the box, Ionic starters have been preconfigured with great defaults for building fast apps, including:

• Multi-core processing tasks in parallel for faster builds
• In-memory file transpiling and bundling
• Transpiling source code to ES5 JavaScript
• Ahead of Time (AoT) template compiling
• Just in Time (JiT) template compiling
• Template inlining for JiT builds
• Bundling modules for faster runtime execution
• Treeshaking unused components and dead-code removal
• Generating CSS from bundled component Sass files
• Autoprefixing vendor CSS prefixes
• Minifying JavaScript files
• Compressing CSS files
• Copying src static assets to www
• Linting source files
• Watching source files for live-reloading

Just the bullet list above is a little overwhelming, and each task requires quite a bit of development time just to get started. Ionic App Script's intention is to make it easier to complete common tasks so developers can focus on building their app, rather than building build scripts.

Note that the Ionic Framework's source is made up of modules and can be packaged by any bundler or build process. However, this project's goal is provide simple scripts to make building Ionic apps easier, while also allowing developers to further configure their build process.

npm Scripts

Instead of depending on external task runners, Ionic App Scripts now prefers being executed from npm scripts. Ionic's npm scripts come preconfigured in the project's package.json file. For example, this is the default setup for npm scripts in each starter:

  "scripts": {
    "ionic:build": "ionic-app-scripts build",
    "ionic:serve": "ionic-app-scripts serve"
  },

To run the build script found in the package.json scripts property, execute:

npm run build

Environments

You can use Node style process.env.MY_VAR syntax directly in your typescript and when the application is bundled it'll be replaced with the following order of precedence:

• If the variable exists in the process environment it will be replaced with that value.
• If the variable is not defined in the process environment it will be read from a .env.dev file for dev builds or .env.prod file for prod builds which are located in the root of the app
• If the variable is not defined in either place it will be undefined

In order to take advantage of this apps will need a src/declarations.d.ts file with the following declaration:

declare var process: { env: { [key: string]: string | undefined; } };

Note: This declaration may conflict if @types/node is installed in your project. See #3541.

Custom Configuration

In many cases, the defaults which Ionic provides cover most of the scenarios required by developers; however, Ionic App Scripts does provide multiple ways to configure and override the defaults for each of the various tasks. Note that Ionic will always apply its defaults for any property that was not provided by custom configuration.

Default Config Files

package.json Config

Ionic projects use the package.json file for configuration. There's a handy config property which can be used. Below is an example of setting a custom config file using the config property in a project's package.json.

  "config": {
    "ionic_cleancss": "./config/cleancss.config.js"
  },

Command-line Flags

Remember how we're actually running ionic-app-scripts from the scripts property of a project's package.json file? Well we can also add command-line flags to each script, or make new scripts with these custom flags. For example:

  "scripts": {
    "build": "ionic-app-scripts build --webpack ./config/webpack.dev.config.js",
    "minify": "ionic-app-scripts minify --cleancss ./config/cleancss.config.js",
  },

The same command-line flags can be also applied to npm run commands too, such as:

npm run build --webpack ./config/webpack.dev.config.js

Overriding Config Files

Overriding Config Values

Ionic Environment Variables

These environment variables are automatically set to Node's process.env property. These variables can be useful from within custom configuration files, such as custom webpack.config.js file.

The process.env.IONIC_ENV environment variable can be used to test whether it is a prod or dev build, which automatically gets set by any command. By default the build and serve tasks produce dev builds (a build that does not include Ahead of Time (AoT) compilation or minification). To force a prod build you should use the --prod command line flag.

process.env.IONIC_ENV environment variable is set to prod for --prod builds, otherwise dev for all other builds.

All Available Tasks

These tasks are available within ionic-app-scripts and can be added to npm scripts or any Node command.

Example NPM Script:

  "scripts": {
    "minify": "ionic-app-scripts minify"
  },

Tips

1. The Webpack devtool setting is driven by the ionic_source_map_type variable. It defaults to source-map for the best quality source map. Developers can enable significantly faster builds by setting ionic_source_map_type to eval.
2. By default, the lint command does not exit with a non-zero status code on error. To enable this, pass --bailOnLintError true to the command.

"scripts" : {
  ...
  "lint": "ionic-app-scripts lint"
  ...
}

npm run lint --bailOnLintError true

The Stack

• Ionic Framework
• TypeScript Compiler
• Angular Compiler (NGC)
• Webpack Module Bundler
• Ionic Component Sass
• Node Sass
• Autoprefixer
• UglifyJS
• CleanCss
• TSLint

Contributing

We welcome any PRs, issues, and feedback! Please be respectful and follow the Code of Conduct.

We use Node 6, and NPM 5 for contributing.

Publish a release

Execute the following steps to publish a release:

1. Run npm run build to generate the dist directory
2. Run npm run test to validate the dist works
3. Temporarily tick the package.json version
4. Run npm run changelog to append the latest additions to the changelog
5. Manually verify and commit the changelog changes. Often times you'll want to manually add content/instructions
6. Revert the package.json version to the original version
7. Run npm version patch to tick the version and generate a git tag
8. Run npm run github-release to create the github release entry
9. Run npm publish to publish the package to npm
10. git push origin master - push changes to master