Do you remember our Ionic Starter Kit for jump starting new Ionic projects? Well it’s still out there. We keep on using it for our new cross platform projects. We also keep on improving and updating it. Today we’re pleased to announce that the latest version is now up on GitHub and ready to ease your Ionic development experience.
The short explanation of what it contains is that we’ve created an extended version of the standard ionic template. If you’re after the nitty gritty though, here’s what the latest update includes:
- SCSS manipulation. Today a lot of projects use a CSS extension language, with SCSS a solid option. That’s why the Ionic starter kit writes sourcemaps, compiles SCSS into CSS, minifies styles and writes it all into a single file.
- JavaScript manipulation. ES6 is a big deal in the world of JavaScript at the moment. That’s why our projects need to be able to use it such that we can be confident of it working on all devices. Babel helps us to achieve this by compiling for ES6. The Ionic starter kit’s JavaScript manipulation also includes: writing sourcemaps, injecting dependencies for Angular via ngAnnotate (don’t forget to use ‘ngInject‘ in the beginning of every Angular component), and minifying all code in a single file.
- In accordance with Angular code best practice, in controllers we use “let vm = this”, so that we can use controllerAs syntax, which is awesome.
- Use of the latest Ionic CLI. The newest Ionic CLI has a lot of fixed bugs, added options for single command and better integration with Ionic Cloud services. For example, now you can:
– Use ionic serve –lab instead of single ionic serve
– Specify IP address, like this: ionic serve –address xx.xx.xx.xxx
– Emulate application in your emulators with livereload, which is very helpful: ionic emulate <platform> –livereload –consolelogs –serverlog
– compile and package the project into an app-store ready application: ionic package <mode> <platform> Mode can be “debug” or “release”, and platform can be “android” or “ios” in the current beta version (1.3.2).
Enjoy using the Kit and developing great new Ionic projects. Tell us about them in the comments below.