Running an ionic 1 app with latest ionic CLI

I first used the Ionic framework in 2015 and it has come a long way since then and it is now up to version 4. My app, My Day To-Do is a native iOS app however it’s UI is powered by HTML5 and more importantly Ionic 1 which involves using the Ionic CLI when debugging it’s UI. Recently, I updated the Ionic CLI and that meant that I couldn’t run my Ionic 1 code the way I used to. Hence In this post, I will share my solution of how to run ionic 1 app with latest ionic CLI.

Problem

After updating the Ionic CLI to 4.10.3 the first error I got when trying to debug my app UI using ionic serve was,

[WARN] Could not determine project type (project config: .\ionic.config.json).

The next error was

Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open ‘DirectoryPath\package.json’

Running Ionic 1 app with latest ionic CLI

To solve this problem, what I had to do was to create a new blank project with the latest Ionic CLI and simply copied those files from there as follows

1. Start a new project with ionic start newApp tabs –type=ionic1  (Remember we need to create an Ionic 1 app)
2. Open newApp/ionic.config.json and change the name property to the name of your app
3. Copy the ionic.config.json file to your project directory which has the Ionic 1 www directory e.g. for My Day To-Do, the structure is mydaytodo/iOSFiles/  mydaytodo/www/ so I copied the ionic.config.json to mydaytodo/
4. Copy the newApp/package.json  to the project directory as well which in my case would be mydaytodo/
5. Next run the npm install command in the directory, what this will do is install some of the devDependancies defined in the package.json file

Once you have copied all those files, execute the ionic serve command on your console and your old project should run.

Now one more thing, one more thing before we wrap up this post. Once you run the ionic serve command after following the above steps, you may also see another error

Some useful links