To make our lives easier, we will be using Expo for managing our React Native development lifecycle. In order to be ready to create new projects, you need to have a few things in place.

Note that this is largely just a distillation of the official Expo installation instructions.

Node.js

Everyone should be familiar with Node.js at this point, and many of you will have a version installed on your machine. because this is a fast moving world, you should make sure you have the latest version of the "long term support" (LTS) release of Node. As I recommended in CS 312, the Node Version Manager (nvm) should make it very straight forward to upgrade to the latest version: nvm install lts/dubnium.

Expo CLI

The next thing we need is Expo command line tools. You can install them through npm:

npm install -g expo-cli

Note that this installs the tool globally (thus the -g). This installs a new command called expo.

Creating an account

You do not need an Expo account in order to test your programs. However, it will be useful later if you want to publish them so you can run them without the development server running. So run the following and answer the questions:

expo register

Expo app

One of the primary benefits of Expo is that it makes running your code on your phone fairly trivial. To be able to do this, however, you need to install the Expo app on your device.

• Android app
• iOS app