Installing Ionic 2 and 3 on same machine

Question

We have several ionic projects and are not keen on upgrading all of our ionic 2 projects to 3 just yet. Can I install both versions of Ionic (and I assume the relevant Cordova) on the same machine and then specify which one to use when building an individual project?

Answer 1

Yes, you can work on Ionic 2 and Ionic 3 projects at the same time on the same machine, because the dependencies of each project are listed in the package.json file, so when you run npm install the right version of each dependency will be installed in each project.

The same happens with cordova plugins, since the installed version of each plugin is stored in the package.json and config.xml files, so when adding platforms or updating plugins the right version will be used for each project.

Besides that, the Ionic CLI allows you to work with Ionic 2 and Ionic 3 projects at the same time (it even allows you to work in Ionic v1 projects) so you won't have any problems when working on Ionic 2 and Ionic 3 projects in the same machine.