Ionic Testing in a Browser

Use ionic serve to start a local development server for app dev and testing. This is useful for both desktop browser testing, and to test within a device  browser which is connected to the same network. Additionally, this command  starts LiveReload which is used to monitor changes in the file system. As soon
as you save a file the browser is refreshed automatically. Take a look at the Sass docs if you would also like to have ionic serve watch the project’s Sass files.

$ ionic serve [options]

LiveReload

By default, LiveReload will watch for changes in your www/ directory, excluding www/lib/. To change this, you can specify a watchPatterns property in the ionic.project file located in your project root to watch  (or not watch) for specific changes.

{
  "name": "myApp",
  "app_id": "",
  "watchPatterns": [
    "www/js/*",
    "!www/css/**/*"
  ]
}

For a reference on glob pattern syntax, check out globbing patterns on the Grunt website.

Note:

$ ionic setup sass 

will add a watchPatterns propery with the default values to your ionic.project file that you can then edit, in addition to the gulpStartupTasks property as  described in the Sass documentation.