Configuration Reference

Many aspects of an application's behavior can be controlled with a platform-agnostic configuration file, config.xml, which is formatted based on the W3C's Packaged Web Apps (Widgets) specification.

For projects created with the Cordova CLI (described in The Command-line Interface), this file can be found in the top-level www directory. Using the CLI to build projects regenerates versions of this file in various subdirectories within platforms. For non-CLI projects, each platform-specific file serves as a source.

While the location of the config.xml file may change depending on the platform, its contents generally do not. Some platform-specific features are also specified in the same configuration file. Details are listed below:

config.xml Elements

The Apache Cordova project strives abstract away native platform specifics via web-inspired and web-based abstractions that are heavily standards driven and adopted by the web community. Please take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the config.xml specification, to understand the type of application metadata the Apache Cordova project aims to abstract and provide simple entry points for.

An example:

    <widget>
        <preference name="MySetting" value="true" />
        <feature name="MyPlugin" value="MyPluginClass" />
        <access origin="*" />
        <content src="index.html" />
    </widget>

A list of supported elements across major platforms which are supported in Apache Cordova follow.

<feature>

These elements map to native APIs that the application accesses. At runtime, the Apache Cordova framework maps <feature> elements to native code to enable your Cordova application to access device APIs otherwise unavailable to typical web-based applications.

<access>

These elements define how your whitelist works. Please see the Domain Whitelist Guide for more information.

<content>

This element defines your application's start page relative to the project's standard web assets root directory. This element is optional, the default is index.html.