Getting Started

Prerequisites

First, you will need a decent text-editor or integrated developer environment. I use and recommend Visual Studio Code. VS Code is a free and open-source cross-platform development environment from Microsoft, designed to work with all the technologies you will be using. Of course, you are free to use whatever tool you are comfortable with.

Note: To run the apps on our platform, we natively support Visual Studio Code in our coding playgrounds so you don’t need to worry about the installation of the editor on the Educative platform!

At the end of this section, you will find a short quiz to test your knowledge of Angular and show you if you are ready to delve into Ionic.

Software tools

Developing and deploying an Ionic application requires some initial configuration. You will need the following tools, in addition to the code editor:

• Node

• NPM

• Git

• The Ionic CLI itself, installed globally

Most of the tools you will use rely on Node, a JavaScript-based runtime environment. I recommend the LTS (long-term-support) version.

NPM is a package manager built on top of node. Most of the tools you need are distributed as npm packages. The npm is automatically installed with node.

Most of the tutorials for Ionic expect you to have Git, a powerful and flexible source control system, and its related tools. If you use a Mac or Linux, you probably already have it.

Installing these items depends on your platform. If you need detailed instructions on how to do that, refer to the Appendix – Installing the Tools.

Note: On Educative, you don’t need to worry about installation, as we already do the installation for you in our coding playgrounds, and all the required tools will be available for use where required!