Installation

Installing the Ionic Windows platform requires installing the Windows App SDK toolchain, and then getting access to and installing the Ionic Windows platform in your Capacitor 3 app:

System Requirements

The Windows App SDK has minimum Windows system requirements. Review the System requirements for Windows app development to learn more.

Currently, Windows 10, version 1809 (Build 17763) is the minimum supported Windows version. Windows 11 is supported.

Windows App SDK Installation

Ionic Windows requires the Windows App SDK toolchain to be installed. To do this, follow the Install tools for Windows app development guide on the Microsoft documentation.

When going through the docs, pick Visual Studio 2022 (the free community edition is sufficient). Follow the "Required workloads and components" section carefully, as several individual components need to be selected in the Visual Studio installer to ensure the proper tools are installed.

When installing the Windows App SDK extension for Visual Studio, choose the stable version.

Finally, enable developer mode on your machine.

WebView2 Installation

Next, the WebView2 runtime must be installed.

Download and install the stable release. We, along with Microsoft, recommend the Evergreen Bootstrapper.

The Evergreen installers provide one copy of WebView2 on a client's machine that is then kept updated and shared with all Windows apps using WebView2 in this manner. WebView2 can also be embedded directly into your app, tying it to a specific version (much like Electron). Learn more about the different install options for WebView2.

Ionic Windows Platform Installation

Once the Windows App SDK toolchain is installed, the next step is to install Ionic Windows into your Ionic/Capacitor app.

To install the Ionic Windows platform, your app must be using Capacitor 3.2.0 or above. You must also have an active Ionic Enterprise install key with access to Ionic Windows.

In your app, run:

npm install @ionic-enterprise/capacitor-windows