This is an alternative project structure for the Ionic Framework demonstrated with the ionic tabs starter.

How to use this project

To use this starter create a new project folder (e.g. 'myApp') for your app and clone this repository into it.

$ cd mkdir myApp
$ git clone https://github.com/flavordaaave/ionic_better_structure.git

Then run npm and bower to get all needed dependencies:

$ npm install
$ bower install

How this project is structured

All working files are underneath the 'src' folder trying to follow the angular styleguide created by johnpapa.

/src
    /app
    /assets
        /fonts
        /images
    /lib
    /styles
    index.html

Everything is set up to serve from this src folder using

$ ionic serve

Build process

This project comes with a before_build hook to run the 'gulp build' task before actually building the app with cordova. The 'gulp build' task concatenates, minifies and copies the files into the 'www' folder from where cordova is loading the files. So you can just use the standard ionic build commands:

$ ionic platform add ios
$ ionic build ios
$ ionic emulate ios

Included gulp tasks

A bunch of useful gulp tasks have been copied from the HotTowel yeoman generator created by johnpapa and modified to work with ionic.

Task Listing

• gulp help

  Displays all of the available gulp tasks.

Code Analysis

• gulp vet

  Performs static code analysis on all javascript files. Runs jshint and jscs.

• gulp vet --verbose

  Displays all files affected and extended information about the code analysis.

Testing

• gulp test

  Runs all unit tests using karma runner & jasmine with phantomjs. Depends on vet task, for code analysis.

Cleaning Up

• gulp clean

  Remove all files from the build and temp folders

• gulp clean-images

  Remove all images from the build folder

• gulp clean-code

  Remove all javascript and html from the build folder

• gulp clean-fonts

  Remove all fonts from the build folder

• gulp clean-styles

  Remove all styles from the temp and build folders

Fonts and Images

• gulp fonts

  Copy the ionic fonts from source to the build folder

• gulp images

  Copy all images from source to the build folder

Styles

• gulp styles

  Compile less files to CSS and copy to the build folder

Lib Files

• gulp wiredep

  Looks up all bower components' main files and JavaScript source code, then adds them to the index.html. The .bowerrc file also runs this as a postinstall task whenever bower install is run.

  NOTE: wiredep will only grab the bower dependencies that are listed in you bower.json file. Use the --save flag when installing dependencies via bower to add them to automatically add them to you bower.json file.

Angular HTML Templates

• gulp templatecache

  Create an Angular module that adds all HTML templates to Angular's $templateCache. This pre-fetches all HTML templates saving XHR calls for the HTML.

• gulp templatecache --verbose

  Displays all files affected by the task.

Serving Development Code

• ionic serve

  You can us the standard ionic serve task here.

Building Production Code

• gulp optimize

  Optimize all javascript and styles, move to a build folder, and inject them into the new index.html

• gulp build

  Copies the ionic fonts, copies images and runs gulp optimize to build the production code to the build folder.

NOTE: This project contains a before_build hook for cordova which so that the gulp build task is run automatically when building with cordova build [platfrom] or ionic build [platfrom]