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 within the project's package.json file. For example, this is the default setup for npm scripts within each starters:

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

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

npm run build

Custom Config Files

In many cases, the defaults which Ionic provides covers 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 configurations.

Default Config Files

NPM Config

Within the package.json file, NPM also provides a handy config property. Below is an example of setting a custom config file using the config property in a project's package.json.

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

Command-line Flags

Remember how we're actually running ionic-app-scripts from the scripts property of 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 --rollup ./config/rollup.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 --rollup ./config/rollup.config.js

Overriding Config Files

Config File	NPM Config Property	Cmd-line Flag
CleanCss	ionic_cleancss	--cleancss or -e
Copy	ionic_copy	--copy or -y
Generator	ionic_generator	--generator or -g
NGC	ionic_ngc	--ngc or -n
Rollup	ionic_rollup	--rollup or -r
Sass	ionic_sass	--sass or -s
TSLint	ionic_tslint	--tslint or -i
UglifyJS	ionic_uglifyjs	--uglifyjs or -u
Webpack	ionic_webpack	--webpack or -w

Overriding Config Values

Config Values	NPM Config Property	Cmd-line Flag	Defaults
bundler	ionic_bundler	--bundler	webpack
root directory	ionic_root_dir	--rootDir	process.cwd()
tmp directory	ionic_tmp_dir	--tmpDir	.tmp
www directory	ionic_www_dir	--wwwDir	www
build directory	ionic_build_dir	--buildDir	build

Ionic Environment Variable

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 task is prod, and the watch task is dev. Note that ionic serve uses the watch task. Additionally, using the --dev command line flag will force the build to use dev.

Please take a look at the bottom of the default Rollup config file to see how the IONIC_ENV environment variable is being used to conditionally change config values for production builds.

All Available Tasks

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

Task	Description
build	Full production build. Use --dev flag for dev build.
bundle	Bundle JS modules.
clean	Empty the www directory.
cleancss	Compress the output CSS with CleanCss
copy	Run the copy tasks, which by defaults copies the src/assets/ and src/index.html files to www.
lint	Run the linter against the source .ts files, using the tslint.json config file at the root.
minify	Minifies the output JS bundle and compresses the compiled CSS.
ngc	Runs just the ngc portion of the production build.
sass	Sass compilation of used modules. Bundling must have as least ran once before Sass compilation.
tsc	Runs just the tsc portion of the dev build.
watch	Runs watch for dev builds.

Example NPM Script:

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

The Stack

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