12/5/2015: Let us know where you want to see Ionic Box go: Vote or Comment on this issue

Ionic Box

Ionic Box is a ready-to-go hybrid development environment for building mobile apps with Ionic, Cordova, and Android. Ionic Box was built to make it easier for developers to build Android versions of their app, and especially for Windows users to get a complete dev environment set up without all the headaches.

For iOS developers, Ionic Box won't do much for you right now unless you are having trouble installing the Android SDK, and Ionic Box cannot be used for iOS development for a variety of legal reasons (however, the ionic package command in beta will soon fix that).

Installation

To install, download and install Vagrant for your platform, then download and install VirtualBox.

Once Vagrant and VirtualBox are installed, you can download the latest release of this GitHub repo, and unzip it. cd into the unzipped folder and run:

$ vagrant up
$ vagrant ssh

The username for vagrant is vagrant and the password is vagrant.

This will download and install the image, and then go through the dependencies and install them one by one. vagrant ssh will connect you to the image and give you a bash prompt. Once everything completes, you'll have a working box to build your apps on Android.

Connected Android Devices

The image also has support for connected USB Android devices. To test whether devices are connected, you can run (from the box):

$ sudo /home/vagrant/android-sdk-linux/platform-tools/adb devices

If that does not work, or shows ????? permissions, then run:

sudo /home/vagrant/android-sdk-linux/platform-tools/adb kill-server
sudo /home/vagrant/android-sdk-linux/platform-tools/adb start-server

Pre-built image

We are testing a pre-built Vagrant cloud image which should be faster than using the Vagrantfile method above. To try it, create a folder where you want to init your dev environment (a great place for this would be in the project folder of your app). Then run:

$ vagrant init drifty/ionic-android
$ vagrant up

If you try this method and it works or you encounter issues, please comment on issue #7.