Getting Started With React Native

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Getting Started with React Native

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Many different kinds of people use React Native: from advanced iOS developers to React beginners, to people getting started programming for the first time in their career. These docs were written for all learners, no matter their experience level or background.

If you are new to mobile development, the easiest way to get started is with Expo Go. Expo is a set of tools and services built around React Native and, while it has many features, the most relevant feature for us right now is that it can get you writing a React Native app within minutes. You will only need a recent version of Node.js and a phone or emulator. If you'd like to try out React Native directly in your web browser before installing any tools, you can try out Snack.

If you are already familiar with mobile development, you may want to use React Native CLI. It requires Xcode or Android Studio to get started. If you already have one of these tools installed, you should be able to get up and running within a few minutes. If they are not installed, you should expect to spend about an hour installing and configuring them.

Expo Go allows you to run your React Native app on a physical device without installing iOS and Android native SDKs. If you want to run your app on the iOS Simulator or an Android Virtual Device, please refer to the instructions for "React Native CLI Quickstart" to learn how to install Xcode or set up your Android development environment.

Android Studio installs the latest Android SDK by default. Building a React Native app with native code, however, requires the Android 12 (S) SDK in particular. Additional Android SDKs can be installed through the SDK Manager in Android Studio.

React Native has a built-in command line interface. Rather than install and manage a specific version of the CLI globally, we recommend you access the current version at runtime using npx, which ships with Node.js. With npx react-native , the current stable version of the CLI will be downloaded and executed at the time the command is run.

If you are new to mobile development, the easiest way to get started is with Expo CLI. Expo is a set of tools built around React Native and, while it has many features, the most relevant feature for us right now is that it can get you writing a React Native app within minutes. You will only need a recent version of Node.js and a phone or emulator. If you'd like to try out React Native directly in your web browser before installing any tools, you can try out Snack.

If you know that you'll eventually need to include your own native code, Expo is still a good way to get started. In that case you'll need to "eject" eventually to create your own native builds. If you do eject, the "React Native CLI Quickstart" instructions will be required to continue working on your project.

Android Studio installs the latest Android SDK by default. Building a React Native app with native code, however, requires the Android 10 (Q) SDK in particular. Additional Android SDKs can be installed through the SDK Manager in Android Studio.

Android Studio installs the latest Android SDK by default. Building a React Native app with native code, however, requires the Android 9 (Pie) SDK in particular. Additional Android SDKs can be installed through the SDK Manager in Android Studio.

If you linked App Center automatically via react-native link (as in step 3.1), you should open the project's ios/appname.xcworkspace file in Xcode. Because App Center CocoaPods dependencies only works with xcworkspace not xcodeproj, and the ios/appname.xcodeproj file won't have App Center CocoaPods dependencies linked.

Those are just few of the APIs you get access to out of the box if you start building React Native apps with Expo. Of course, these APIs are available to you as well via native modules if you develop your app using the standard React Native setup.

It's possible to add React to a website without create-react-app by copying some elements into an HTML file, but the create-react-app CLI is a common starting point for React applications. Using it will allow you to spend more time building your app, and less time fussing with setup.

Releases of React prior to the React 17 release in 2020 also required an import of the React library itself, as in - import React from 'react'. Skipping this step would result in an error: React turned the JSX we write into React.createElement(), so all React components needed to import the React module. React 17 introduced a new, rewritten version of the JSX transform that makes this statement unnecessary, with backported support to React 16.14.0, React 15.7.0, and React 0.14.10 (read more on the official React doc).

Line 7 calls React's ReactDOM.createRoot() function with the DOM element inside which we want the component to be rendered, in this case the element with an ID of root. If you look inside public/index.html, you'll see that this is a element just inside the . React will create a root for this node, and take over managing the DOM inside it (read more on the official react doc). The function returns the root which we can use to render a React element into the DOM. 2ff7e9595c