How to run a react native app (a bare workflow from expo or a regular one) in web (browser)?

Question

I'm trying to run my React Native app as a web site, on a browser.

I tried to go according to https://necolas.github.io/react-native-web/docs/installation/ but the instructions on the Setup page are not clear. I found some (rare) posts regarding this, but they are old (2019) and seem to deviate from the info in the link above.

I use yarn android to run it on android.

So, I tried using yarn web. Didn't work.

Also, tried the basic react-native start followed by react-native run-web.

It seems the run-web command is not what is needed.

Any assist appreciated.

P.S. I initialized my project through Expo, as a Bare Workflow project. Hope that helps

Answer 1

According to the docs:

Expo for web can work on any React Native project. When you initialize a new project with a bare workflow template using expo-cli, if you run yarn web or npm run web it will start up expo-cli and open your project in a web browser.

The same guides for web from the managed workflow apply here.

So basically just initialise your project using expo init project-name and then select bare workflow or managed workflow. After that you can execute npm run web. It will open up the browser and run the web version of it. Keep in mind that there are some incompatibility of libraries from expo, for example, the Webview is incompatible on the web so you need to switch when on web to an iframe or so.