Welcome back to part 2 of our React Native series. We’ll be showing you how to create a React Native app from scratch. In this part we are going to focus solely on setting up our development environment and the necessary tools needed to get things up and running.
Depending on the type of OS you have, whether it is a Windows, Mac or a Linux, setting up the appropriate development environment will require some different steps but overall they’re all very similar. In this article, I will be setting up the environment from a Mac perspective, but I will show you which areas differ for Windows / Linux. The usual flow for installation is to basically install Node and the appropriate software for Android and iOS. Keep in mind that if you are on a Windows or Linux computer, you won’t be able to run your project on an iOS simulator. iOS is specific for MacOS. Of course we are able to use the expo client to run our project but in this specific article we will not cover expo, that will be for a future article so stay tuned!