Introduction
Capacitor is a modern "Native Progressive Web Apps" platform. Through it, Bionic apps can currently be deployed in iOS and Android (Capacitor Web and Capacitor Electron coming soon).
Requirements
NodeJS
Capacitor depends on NodeJS. Please install or ensure that you are using a current NodeJS version:
> node --version v9.5.0
Capacitor requires npx, a CLI tool installed along with nodejs:
> npx --version 9.7.1
If npx is not available then upgrade node to a recent version.
Tip
If you need to maintain multiple versions of node then Node Version Manager (nvm) may be of help.
Windows users will have to make node commands available through PATH env variable.
Python
Capacitor also requires Python in order to run some scripts. Bionic was only tested against Python 2.7. If you are on Windows, please make python executables available in the PATH.
> python --version Python 2.7.15
Android Studio
If you intend to target Android in this project, you will need to download and install Android Studio.
iOS
If you intend to target iOS (iPhone/iPad and whatever starts with i), you will need to have an Apple Mac and download and install XCode.
Getting Started with Capacitor
First, we need to download and install Bionic's Capacitor Plugin. This step is only required once per project. From your project (or Blazor Client) directory do:
> bionic platform add capacitor 🔍 Looking for capacitor platform plugin ☕ Found it! Adding capacitor plugin... 🚀 capacitor platform successfully added
This will create the necessary assets under platforms/capacitor.
Next you need to initialize Capacitor. The process will ask for an App name and an App package ID. Please make sure the package ID follows the Java package naming convention:
> bionic platform capacitor init ... ? App name BionicApp ? App Package ID (must be a valid Java package) com.bionic.app ✔ Initializing Capacitor project in ...
Capacitor Targets
Capacitor can deploy in 4 different targets: