Update Ionic Framework CLI and Your Ionic Project to Ionic 5

Update Ionic Framework CLI and Your Ionic Project to Ionic 5

As you know the Ionic framework is continuously updated and It’s now on version 5 so developers are finding themselves all the time working with an old version, well at least this is my case. In this post, I’ll show you the way I follow to update both the Ionic CLI and Ionic library inside existing projects.

If you are looking for a one command to update Ionic, unfortunately it doesn't exist till this moment, but don’t worry the steps to follow are not complex or long and here is how you do it.

Before you update your Ionic CLI and library you may need to check your currently installed version

How to get your current Ionic version?

Go ahead and open your terminal under Linux or MAC or your command prompt under Windows and enter:

ionic info

In my case i’m getting this output

So the version of Ionic CLI is 2.1.0-beta.3 and the version of Ionic library is 2.1.0-beta.1

You can also execute the following command

Ionic -v

Which displays the current version of the Ionic CLI

So now, after getting your Ionic CLI and library versions you should be able to decide if you need to update the framework or if you have already the most recent version of Ionic.

After that, you need to know which is the latest version of Ionic to see if you have an old version or not so just go Ionic framework official website and verify the latest version:

Updating the Ionic CLI and Library version

You are not running the latest version of Ionic, don’t worry you can easily update both the CLI and the library (for projects you are currently working on) so let's start by updating the Ionic CLI.

All you need to do is opening your terminal/command prompt and enter:

npm update -g ionic 

If somehow that doesn’t work, you can also uninstall ionic and reinstall it:

npm uninstall -g ionic 
npm install -g ionic

Under Linux or MAC you may need to do sudo before your npm commands, and provide your sudo password, depending on your system and npm settings.

Now you can execute the previous commands to verify your current version.

But if you need to update the Ionic library for an existing project generated with the old version then just enter to your project directory and execute the following command

ionic lib update

That is it! The Ionic CLI will take care of downloading and updating the library

Getting available Ionic versions on NPM

You can also view all available versions of Ionic that exist on NPM registry using the following command:

npm info ionic

How to install a specific version of Ionic?

Now what if you somehow need to install or use a specific version of Ionic? Is it possible to install a previous version of Ionic framework (CLI and library)? Yes, it’s totally possible. All you need to do is checking for available versions of Ionic using the command above and then install your chosen version with your terminal by issuing:

npm install -g [email protected]

Conclusion

So this is how you can update your Ionic framework both the CLI and library. Keep in mind that Ionic framework is always adding new features and improvements so you need to keep your framework version updated to the latest release.