Install production version of ionic 4 - I do not want ionic 5

I see they have updated to ionic 5. I want to use ionic 4 how can I install this on my new PC.

 npm install -g ionic

installs version 5

@brandyshea, @mhartington: This is an absolutely never-ending source of confusion here. Can you please issue some official advice about what terminology we should be using? I have been doing my best for years to get people to stop using “Ionic 3” and “Ionic 4”, but apparently have not made a dent at all.

@Mothbeard: “Ionic” isn’t a monolithic thing. The CLI (the thing that builds your app) and the framework (the thing that gets embedded in your app) run on parallel version tracks that aren’t related. CLI 5 has been released for a while, and is safe to use to build production apps of framework 3, 4, and 5 (which is still pre-release). So the bottom line is “don’t worry about it”, and if you don’t believe me, start a new project and look at its package.json for the @ionic/angular version therein.

While there is already an effort made by having it installed as @ionic/cli I suggest to rename the cli command to ‘clionic’

And issue an award for every 10th person asking the question without bothering to search the answer on the forum

:crazy_face::crazy_face::crazy_face::crazy_face:

Good news - we actually released Ionic CLI 6.0.0 under the npm tag @ionic/cli within the last week. This has been a long time coming and it took some convincing internally to get a more descriptive package name, but I think this will help in the future! We tweeted about this earlier: https://twitter.com/Ionicframework/status/1223268498362851330?s=20

The documentation on the site has been updated to reflect this: How to Install The Ionic Framework CLI to Build Mobile Apps

The older package will live on since there are so many tutorials out there that use the ionic package, but this is a step in the right direction.

As for how to respond to any package confusion, I wrote up a response awhile back that may be helpful to link to:

Usually when we see incorrect packages being referenced we’ll recommend running ionic info from within the project as that gives the best overview of the different packages & their versions. Hopefully that helps. :slightly_smiling_face:

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