What is the purpose of taco.json in Apache Cordova Visual Studio 2015 project?

Question

I am playing with the new Apache Cordova blank template in Visual Studio 2015 RC. I noticed the taco.json file in the project. Besides defining the version of Apache Cordova you are using does it serves any other purpose?

Is it something like bower to define other frameworks like angular or bootstrap in there?

Answer 1

Geert,

taco.json file is currently used by Visual Studio to define Cordova CLI version used to build the project with. If you open up config.xml designer, under the platforms tab you will see the Cordova CLI version specified.

When you build/run your app for iOS, the remote agent uses the CLI version defined in your taco.json file to ensure that the remote machine uses the correct version of Cordova to build your app.

Currently, taco.json file is only used by Visual Studio and Visual Studio CLI (like vs-mda-remote) and does not define bower packages.

Answer 2

A bit of extra information... "taco" is an acronym for "Tools for Apache Cordova". In the RC release of Visual Studio, taco.json only includes a single key-value pair declaring the version of Cordova used in the project. For example:

{
    "cordova-cli": "4.3.0"
}

If you want to use a different version of Cordova (greater than 4.3), just change the value on the right side of the colon.

Answer 3

Geert,

I have not used this feature, but based on the existing documentation, taco.json is used for continuous integration servers.

Documentation with details can be found here: https://github.com/Microsoft/cordova-docs/blob/master/tutorial-gulp/gulp-ci.md https://github.com/Microsoft/cordova-docs/blob/master/tutorial-team-build/README.md

Answer 4

To add to an older question:

Since TACO v1.0.0 was officially release on Thursday (1 October 2015), Here's the new official site: taco.tools.

I found this site to be a great place to get started and extra info on TACO.