Greetings...All
I'm back with yet another post covering different technologies I'm using on my quest to build my first mobile app!📱😀 Let's get right to it!
Using Expo
I covered Expo a little bit in my last post React Native: An introduction, but I wanted to talk about it more here and how it's being used in my project. First off, Expo is a powerful framework that has tons of capabilities and functionality for developing your project. It also has pretty decent documentation about how to use it.
I was introduced to it a few years ago when taking a LinkedIn Learning course over React Native called React Native Fundamentals with Eve Porcello (at least I think that's the title!😅). You can install the Expo Go app on your mobile device of choice to see your app being developed in real time. It auto-refreshes every time you save a file, and outputs info in the console. You can create an app in just a few commands like so:
create-expo-app my-app
cd my-app
npx expo start
That simple!
Building in Expo
Once you start using packages that require higher permissions for your device, you have to install/use the Expo Dev Client npm package. At a high level, in order to run these newly installed higher privilege packages, you have to install EAS and by running the following:
npm install -g eas-cli
eas login (Your Expo account login)
eas build:configure
then finally
eas build --platform platform.
This will create a build which you can monitor via conveniently output url in the console. Even if there are errors in your build, the logging is robust enough to pinpoint the root of the problem.
I still have a good bit to learn about Expo, as it is a really powerful tool and can at times be a lot to navigate. I was able to create a development build to run on the android simulator, but an iOS build has been a little tricky. I think I have to download the dev build to install onto my iPhone, but haven't quite gotten there yet.
Does any of this make sense? Is there anything specific you might have questions about? Y'all let me know in the comments! 👇🏽
Until next time 🤙🏽🤙🏽
Peace,
JJ
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