August 5, 2015
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Ionic Platform Services: Making Development Easier

Rudy Pelrine

ionic-platform
Over the past two months, we’ve released open alphas of our first three Ionic platform services. In this short amount of time, we’ve seen thousands of updates to apps through Ionic Deploy, hundreds of thousands of push notifications sent to devices through Ionic Push, and millions of actions tracked in Ionic Analytics!

Needless to say, it’s been busy over here, and we’ve been getting tons of valuable feedback from our early users. That feedback has motivated us to add some cool new functionality to make developing apps on the Ionic services platform even more seamless. We’ve made some changes to the CLI to make it easier to get started using the Ionic Platform, and we’ve made updates and added new features to Ionic Deploy.

Integrating Ionic Services

We want our services to be easy to set up, with clear documentation, so we’ve made some changes to the CLI to help new devs get started with Ionic platform services:

  • No more .config(): Now, apps that are synced with the Ionic platform will automatically grab the information they need to communicate with our servers. That means your API key and app ID are automatically set for you!
  • No more uploads (if you don’t want them): If you want to start a project on apps.ionic.io but don’t want your code in the cloud, just run ionic io init, and you’re ready to go!
  • No more fooling with index.html and remembering injections: Want to add Ionic Push to your app? Type ionic add ionic-service-push, and you’re good to go! The files you need are automatically included in the right place, so you can focus on writing your app.

Ionic Deploy Updates

One of the most exciting things you can do with Ionic Deploy is update large parts of your app at the click of a button, without app store approval. We felt we could make it even better, so we’ve rolled out numerous stability fixes for the deploy service, plus these new features:

  • Channels: Gone are the days where all your deploy history is stored in a single list. Now, you have full control over as many different version histories as you need. Want a ‘staging’ and ‘production’ channel, so your beta testers can see new features early? It works right out of the box!
  • Deploying from the CLI: You don’t need to open your browser to manage Ionic Deploy anymore. Now, you can attach notes to individual updates and deploy them to any of your channels right from the CLI!
  • Quality of life improvements: We found that integrating Ionic Deploy could make local development of an app difficult, so we’ve made some changes to ensure that the service will never overwrite your local changes. You can keep working on your app, without Ionic trying to download updates.

How do I get started?

If you’re new to the platform, check out our updated docs to jump right into Ionic’s platform services, or take a look at the Push and Deploy documentation for more specific guides.

Stay tuned for regular updates from the Ionic platform services team! And, as always, we welcome your feedback!


Rudy Pelrine