I've just started to use the v1.0.1 of the ionic framework (by manually including the ionic css and js files and changing my directives to ionic directives) with a existing Cordova/Angular app for iOS/Android. My build infrastructure is currently setup to use the Cordova cli tools (v5.0) and I'd prefer to not change it if possible.
Is there any reason I shouldn't continue building my app using the Cordova cli rather than swapping to the ionic cli? Are there any potential compatibility issues? I understand that ionic is just a layer on top of Angular so it shouldn't have any effect on the app build process so building with Cordova should be ok?
Yes, building with Cordova CLI will be perfectly fine - Ionic actually uses Cordova in the backend.
So, for example ionic plugin add http://github.com/somePlugin does basically the same thing as cordova plugin add http://github.com/somePlugin.
Below you can see my terminal output, to affirm what I said above:
C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\test\plugintest>cordova plugin add cordova-plugin-camera
Fetching plugin "cordova-plugin-camera" via npm
npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/cordova-plugin-camera
npm http 200 https://registry.npmjs.org/cordova-plugin-camera
npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/cordova-plugin-camera/-/cordova-plugin-camera-1.2.0.tgz
npm http 200 https://registry.npmjs.org/cordova-plugin-camera/-/cordova-plugin-camera-1.2.0.tgz
C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\test\plugintest>cordova plugin list
com.ionic.keyboard 1.0.4 "Keyboard"
cordova-plugin-camera 1.2.0 "Camera"
cordova-plugin-console 1.0.1 "Console"
cordova-plugin-device 1.0.1 "Device"
cordova-plugin-splashscreen 2.1.0 "Splashscreen"
cordova-plugin-whitelist 1.0.0 "Whitelist"
C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\test\plugintest>ionic plugin list
com.ionic.keyboard 1.0.4 "Keyboard"
cordova-plugin-camera 1.2.0 "Camera"
cordova-plugin-console 1.0.1 "Console"
cordova-plugin-device 1.0.1 "Device"
cordova-plugin-splashscreen 2.1.0 "Splashscreen"
cordova-plugin-whitelist 1.0.0 "Whitelist"
C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\test\plugintest>cordova plugin remove cordova-plugin-camera
Removing "cordova-plugin-camera"
C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\test\plugintest>ionic plugin add cordova-plugin-camera
Updated the hooks directory to have execute permissions
Fetching plugin "cordova-plugin-camera" via npm
npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/cordova-plugin-camera
npm http 304 https://registry.npmjs.org/cordova-plugin-camera
Saving plugin to package.json file
However, ionic cli has some additional features (like for example ionic resources to name at least one) which you may want to use to generate splash screen and icons.
Found this on the ionic-cli github page:
Ionic uses Cordova underneath, so you can also substitute Cordova commands to prepare/build/emulate/run, or to add additional plugins.
So it's fine to use Cordova to build it.