Cordova Command-Line Interface

The Command-Line Interface

This guide shows you how to create applications and deploy them to various native mobile platforms using the cordova command-line interface (CLI). This tool allows you to create new projects, build them on different platforms, and run on real devices or within emulators. The CLI is the main tool to use for the cross-platform workflow (See the Overview for a description of the various workflows.) However, you can also use the CLI to initialize project code, after which you use various platforms' SDKs and shell tools for continued development.

Prerequisites

Before running any command-line tools, you need to install SDKs for each platform you wish to target. (See the Platform Guides for more details.)
To add support or rebuild a project for any platform, you need to run the command-line interface from the same machine that supports the platform's SDK. The CLI supports the following combinations:

• iOS (Mac)
• Amazon Fire OS (Mac, Linux, Windows)
• Android (Mac, Linux)
• BlackBerry 10 (Mac, Linux, Windows)
• Windows Phone 7 (Windows)
• Windows Phone 8 (Windows)
• Windows 8 (Windows)
• Firefox OS (Mac, Linux, Windows)

On the Mac, the command-line is available via the Terminal application. On the PC, it's available as Command Prompt under Accessories.
The more likely it is that you run the CLI from different machines, the more it makes sense to maintain a remote source code repository, whose assets you pull down to local working directories.
To install the cordova command-line tool, follow these steps:

1. Download and install Node.js. Following installation, you should be able to invoke node or npm on your command line.
2. Install the cordova utility. In Unix, prefixing the additional sudo command may be necessary to install development utilities in otherwise restricted directories: