Ionic Tutorial #1 - Overview, installation and creating the project

In Mobile App Development


Ionic Tutorial #1 - Overview, installation and creating the project - read the full article about app development tutorial, Mobile App Development and Native and cross-platform solutions from IT with Paulo Alves on Qualified.One
alt
IT with Paulo Alves
Youtube Blogger
alt

hello everyone my name is paulo alves and on this  video im going to start coding with you the front end of the mobile application of my new startup  called Reciclica. if you havent seen the previous videos and you dont know what the startup idea  is about, you can click somewhere here on top of the screen and then youre gonna be redirected to  the video explaining everything. but well, as i already have said the front end of the application  is gonna be built using the ionic framework and in this video we are gonna do three things: first  being what the idea of the ionic framework is, then we are going to install the ionic  framework in our machines and, third, we are going to actually start the construction of the  application so lets do it. so, lets get started with a short summary of what ionic is before we  actually create the project. alright, the ionic framework is a set of tools that use javascript,  css, and html and with these tools we can create user graphical interface, meaning what the user  actually sees and does, like button clicks, pages menu bars and etc. so with that we already  can see that the ionic framework is made for the front end also with it we can create applications  that run on several different platforms, like web, android and ios, i mean, with the ionic framework  we can create a website, an android application that you can download from google play or an ios  app that you can download from the app store, whats really cool about this is that you can  do these three things at the same time and with the same source code, so only one source code  for multiple platforms. this is called hybrid development. and, all right, after the summary of  the summary on what is the idea of ionic, lets go to the framework web page to take a better  look on how it works. so, here is the home page, right, the landing page of ionic which has a lot  of information about how the framework actually works, but for this video we are interested in  the installation part. here in documentation, installation subsection. this page here has all  the instructions that we need to install ionic. there are two steps basically: first install  node.js and then actually do the installation of the ionic framework. so lets start from the  beginning right. first i have to install the node.js on my machine, so ill go to the node.js  webpage. javascript is a language that usually runs in the browser, right? but with node.js we  actually can run it outside of the browser. in case you dont have node.js installed just come  to the webpage, download the version recommended for most of users and do the normal installation  process, same thing as you do to install any other application on your computer. then, to check  that everything has been correctly installed, go here on the command line and type node -v. this  -v means version. so here we can see the version, which means that the node.js is installed. now  we can come back to the ionic installation page, so we already did this very simple first step,  which is to install node.js. now what we have to do is to install the ionic cli. cli stands for  command line interface. after installing the command line interface we will be able to execute  the ionic commands, like to create a new project, the command to create a new page, to create a  new service and etc. at the previous step when we installed the node.js we also installed something  called npm, which stands for node package manager. with this npm well be able to install node.js  packages, so what we are going to do now is to use the node package manager to install globally,  this -g means that it will be installed on our entire computer not only in the directory i am in  right now, the ionic command line interface. so all right lets run this on the command line and  also as i already have node.js installed this will run without any problems. i guess it will do for  you too. so all right after only these two steps the installation of the tools necessary for me  to start programming with ionic have already been made. ill close here the command line and ill  open the visual studio code, which is the IDE that i use to program. ide for those who dont  know means integrated development environment. its like a program that helps with the creation  of other programs, i mean, which makes it easier for us to work with programming lets say. okay,  what we are going to do now finally is to create our project using the ionic framework. im here in  the projects parent folder, called reciclica and, in order to create the project, i will use  exactly the cli that we just installed on our machines. then to create the ionic project  i need to type here ionic start, to start, the name of the project, which is reciclica-app,  and the project template that i want to create. ionic gives us three templates that we can choose  from which are this tree here: the blank template, the tabs template and the side menu template. i  prefer the side menu template for my app so ill use it. so lets right side menu. after typing  enter the ionic cli will ask me which framework that i want to use i mean what language i am  going to use to develop my mobile application. well. like i told you on the previous video, on  the first video, actually, showing the idea of the startup, i am more familiar with angular,  so ill choose angular, but i also could choose between react or view for now. so lets choose  angular now the ionic cli asks me if i want to integrate the project with capacitor; ill simply  answer no for now and then type enter again here you can see that the libraries necessary  for the project to work are being downloaded and a few seconds later when finally the project is  created the ionic cli asks me if i want to create an account on ionic platform. ill just answer no  and lets move on. here you can see the projects folder, reciclica-app, with all the folders and  files needed to run the application. here on the command line there are some instructions also for  running the project. first ill go to the projects folder because now im in the parent folder the  reciclica folder, but the project is actually in the reciclica-app folder. after this ill type  the command ionic serve. after a few seconds it shows here the url where ill be able to take a  look at my application locally. so im going to copy the url, im going to go to the browser and  im going to open now a new tab and then open our application. you can see that we have a menu here,  the main body and the header of the application. its working here in the browser, i mean, its  running on the web environment. to make it work on the mobile environment, i mean on android  or ios with an application that you install from the application store, i will have to do a  few more steps, but this isnt the goal of this video right. but if i want to see how this will  look in the mobile environment i can just press the f12 key and then after clicking here on the  cell phone icon we can see how it looks on the mobile environment all right. it also has  the side menu here that i can open and close, i can drag the side menu to the side and i  can do a lot of things that are similar to mobile applications. this is the android view  by the way. i can also show you the ios view and in order to do that i will have to update the  page by pressing the f5 key. you can see that the app has some modifications, like the menu icon now  is above the title and the icons on the side menu are now different and so on. so we can already see  that the ionic adapts itself to the type of device you are using. so pretty cool right. now we have  started the project but the changes to the code for it to become the way i want, i mean the way  my application should actually work, those changes will be done on the next videos. and thats it  for today it was just a pretty simple step-by-step summary on the ionic framework. all the links you  need for this video are going to be here on the description of the video, in case i didnt forget  to put them there. and the next video is gonna be like the second part of this video where im  gonna do two things: first i will show you all the directories and files that were created in this  project right here that we just created and then we are gonna push this code to a public repository  on github, meaning that everyone can see it so youll be able to download the project, to analyze  it, make comments make modifications and so on. so just dont forget to subscribe to the  channel and ill see you on the next video

IT with Paulo Alves: Ionic Tutorial #1 - Overview, installation and creating the project - Mobile App Development