Initially I have used btford socket.io library for my ionic project, but I am having trouble working with it. Now I am trying to install socket.io directly to an ionic project. However I am not sure whether it should installed as an npm install which will store it in the node_modules folder, or should i store the library in ionicprj/www/lib ?
socket.io client library should go in www/lib/ to emit events from the ionic app. On the server you'll want socket.io as an npm module.
There's a helpful tutorial here: http://www.htmlxprs.com/post/6/creating-a-realtime-image-sharing-app-with-ionic-and-socketio-tutorial