Quickstart a Cordova application

17 July 2015

This guide uses the Cordova CLI, and is a condensed version of the Apache Cordova Documentation.

• Install any development kits you’ll need to compile for your target platforms;
• Install Node and Git if you haven’t already;
• Install Cordova if you haven’t already, using npm install -g cordova (-g makes it global).

Start an app

Run the command prompt as admin on Windows (File, Open command prompt, Open command prompt as administrator)

Run the following commands using the directory you want to create, a unique namespace you own, and a new app name:

cordova create AppDirectory uk.co.mywebsite.myapp AppName
cd AppDirectory
cordova platform add wp8
cordova platform add android

…adding a line for any other platforms you want to target. The opposite of add is rm.

This generated a skeleton directory with some default files. The docs say,

Any initialization should be specified as part of the deviceready event handler, referenced by default from www/js/index.js.

…but I feel like it doesn’t matter. You can wipe out basically all of the HTML, JS, and CSS installed by cordova create and it still works, but you should preserve the useful directory structure.

Add plugins if you want, specifying a cordova-registered name or a git url:

cordova plugin add phonegap-plugin-barcodescanner
cordova plugin add https://github.com/apache/cordova-plugin-console.git

Use rm to remove

Build and deploy

To build and deploy your current code onto attached USB devices, just type

cordova run

A breakdown of what this does

This does cordova prepare and compile as pre-requisites, then runs the build on available devices.

• prepare copies the latest files across to each platform folder, ready to compile;
• compile gets the appropriate compiler (MSBuild, JDK, etc.) to build it into a native app;
• build is an alias command which does both of the above but does not run the project;
• run does everything.

If you want to run the existing build without recompiling, use cordova run --nobuild. For info, try cordova help run.

Have fun and check out the documentation from the start of this document if you get stuck! :) Ste

Written 2015-07-17