Qlue-app-scripts NPM

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"
  },

qlue-app-scripts v0.0.2