As a React Native engineer, you'll often work as part
of the development team. When joining a project Midway, the task of setting
up a project from scratch is likely
already complete. But what if you are working independently on a
personal project? The steps to setting
up a project from scratch are
important to know. Let's say you've now
been assigned to work on Little
Lemons app project, and are tasked with
building an app for both Android and iOS. The mobile app allows customers
to order food online. The restaurant conducted a
study and determined that customers found ordering food online via the
website difficult. They expressed that
they would like to see a solution that
is easier to use. Here is where you come
in with developing the mobile app to
give little lemon customers a seamless experience. In this video, you'll start
setting up your project so that you can create the
app using React Native. You'll then get a preview of the key steps for the rest
of the setup procedure, which you'll be guided through across the rest of this lesson. You'll set up a
project using Expo, a framework that
enables a suite of incredible features
for React Native apps. There are two sets
of tools that are required when
developing in Expo. The first is the command
line tool called Expo CLI to serve your project. The second tool is a mobile
client app called Expo go, which opens the project on
Android and iOS platforms. So, install both tools
by referencing the official Expo documentation
page at docs.expo.dev. You can also find this link
in the additional resources. Once you have both
tools up and running, you can initialize a
new project by typing the following code in
your terminal, n, p x, create- expo-app, my-app, ampersand, ampersand
CD, my- app. Note that my-app in this example serves as a placeholder for
the name of the application. The next step is to run the development server with
the following command in the terminal; npx expo start. When you run npx expo start, expo CLI starts
the metro Bundler. This Bundler is a HTTP
server that compiles the JavaScript code
of your app using fable and serves it
to the Expo app. The command outputs a QR
code on the terminal. The next step is to open the
expo GO app on your device. On an Android device, you would press scan QR code on the Home tab of
the Expo Go app, then scan the QR code
displayed in the terminal. On an iPhone or iPad, open the default
Apple camera app and once again scan the QR
code from the terminal. Important aspects to note are
recapping version control, setting up the
repository with Git to make collaborations easy or ensuring your work is
continuously sync across all machines to prevent any loss as you
work independently. The good news is that all
projects created with the Expo CLI come with get set up straight
out of the box. Once you configure a
remote repository, commit your project code and share your project
with others later on. After learning about
the importance of using version control, focus on tracking code
changes and your repository, combining into
organizing code changes, and creating and
checking all branches. Additional resources
are available to aid you as you learn
to commit and push your repository
using the terminal or command line interface. Finally, explore and engage with the exercises before testing your knowledge in the quizzes. In this video, you
discovered why Expo is a great tool to start up a
new React Native application. You unpacked creating
a new project with expo CLI and running the application with
Expo Go on your devices. You also understand
the importance of a distributed version
control system to share your work
with your peers.