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What is TACO?

The Tools for Apache Cordova – "TACO" for short – provide a set of command line utilities that make hybrid app development easier, friendlier, and faster.

For developers new to Cordova, TACO makes it crazy-easy to setup your dev environment so you can begin coding immediately. The install-reqs utility downloads, installs and configures all the build tools you need for each mobile platform. Once you’ve started coding, TACO makes life a little sweeter by providing a gentle nudge toward the most likely “next steps” and best practices. If you’re looking for a safety blanket, TACO has one of those, too. “TACO Kits” provide a set of validated open source components (e.g. platforms, build tools and plugins) so you don’t have to wade through the morass of download stats, star ratings and open issues to know which components are both stable and compatible with your app. Since building for iOS platform requires a Mac, TACO also provides a utility to connect to a remotebuild server, so that you can build iOS projects from your Windows machine.

Faster setup. Friendlier command line. Validated quality at run-time. TACO is your friend.

Quick Start

Using TACO, start building awesome Apache Cordova apps really quickly by following these steps:

1. Install the tools:

Make sure you have Node.js installed. Note: Latest version of NodeJS has issues with iOS build

Run the following command to install the latest version of TACO:

npm install -g taco-cli

Note: On OSX and Linux, you may need to prefix this command with sudo

2. Create a new app:

taco create myAwesomeApp

3. Navigate to the directory of your new project:

cd myAwesomeApp

4. Add the Android platform:

taco platform add android

5. (Optional) Check for any missing Android dependencies:

taco install-reqs android

6. Build for Android:

taco build android

7. Run the app on the Android emulator:

taco emulate android

After a few moments, your app will be running inside the Android emulator in all its awesomeness. The steps to build for Windows and iOS are very similar, but this should help you get started.

Remember, when in doubt, just type:

taco help

Community

• Have a question that's not a feature request or bug report? Discuss on Stack Overflow
• Read our Blog
• Have a feature request or find a bug? Submit an issue
• Contribute to TACO source

Development

In order to build the TACO packages, ensure that you have Git and Node.js installed.

Clone a copy of the repo:

git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/TACO.git

Change to TACO directory:

cd TACO

Install dev dependencies

npm install

Building TACO

TACO uses gulp based build system. To build TACO packages, simply run following command from root folder

gulp

Above command will build and install TACO packages. It will also create a globally-installed symbolic link ("npm link") to TACO packages

Running TACO

Once TACO has been built and linked properly, you can use TACO packages from globally-installed symbolic link

• To run taco-cli run

taco

• Similarly to run remotebuild run

remotebuild

Running tests

Please run following to make sure all tests are passing

gulp run-tests

Getting tests coverage

To check test coverage, please run following command

gulp coverage

Coding guidelines

TACO uses tslint rules specified in tslint.json. Run following command to make sure code is tslint clean

gulp tslint

LICENSE

TACO is licensed under the MIT Open Source license.