Using Expo CLI

Learn how and why you can use Expo CLI instead of @react-native-community/cli in any React Native project.

To use Expo CLI in a project created with npx react-native init, you will first need to install the expo package. This package includes the Expo Modules API and Expo CLI. For a complete explanation of how to install this, see the Install Expo modules guide. For most apps, it's as simple as running the following command in your project directory:

Why Expo CLI instead of npx react-native

Expo CLI commands provide a number of benefits over the similar commands in @react-native-community/cli, including:

• You can open up the Hermes debugger in one keystroke: J.
• The debugger ships with React Developer Tools (react-devtools) already installed.
• Support for Continuous Native Generation (CNG) with npx expo prebuild for easy upgrades, white-labeling, simple third-party package setup, and improved maintainability of your codebase (by reducing the surface area).
• Support for file-based routing with expo-router.
• View native logs directly in the terminal alongside your JavaScript logs.
• Improved native build log formatting by using Expo CLI's own xcpretty-style tool that is built specifically for React Native apps. For example, when compiling a Pod you can see which Node module included it.
• Automatic TypeScript support.
• Automatic web support with Metro.
• Out of the box support for monorepos.
• Support for Expo tooling such as expo-dev-client, the Expo Updates protocol and EAS Update.
• npx expo run:ios will invoke pod install automatically when needed.
• npx expo install picks known compatible versions of dependencies for well-known packages.
• npx expo run:[android|ios] and npx expo start automatically detect if an app is running on the default port and suggests another.
• Select an Android or iOS device to launch into using Shift + I or Shift + A from the interactive prompt.
• Built-in support for serving your app over an ngrok tunnel, which is useful for testing on physical devices on restricted networks.

We recommend Expo CLI for most React Native projects that target Android, iOS, and/or web. It does not yet have built-in support for the most popular out-of-tree platforms, macOS and Windows — if you are building for those platforms, you can use Expo CLI for the supported platforms and @react-native-community/cli for the others.

Compiling and running your app

Once you have the expo package installed, you can use the npx expo run:android and npx expo run:ios commands as alternatives to npx react-native run-android and npx react-native run-ios. You can pass in the --device flag to select a device/simulator to build for — this also works for any connected iOS device.

Starting the bundler

npx expo run:[android|ios] will start the bundler/development server. You can skip that by passing in --no-bundler flag. Start the development server independently with npx expo start --dev-client.

Common questions

module.exports = {
  dependencies: {
    expo: {
      platforms: {
        android: null,
        ios: null,
        macos: null,
      },
    },
  },
};

Learn more

With the expo package installed and configured in your project, you can start using all features from Expo CLI and SDK.