react-native-windows-start.md

Getting started with react-native-windows

React Native for Windows is a really powerful implementation of React Native for building Windows apps, the RN Windows documentation is pretty good, but this guide is meant to be a little more direct.

Here's how to spin one up!

Prerequisites

This assumes you are on a Windows machine (or VM via Parallels or Microsoft Dev Box) and have installed all the prerequisites for RN Windows. There is a great PowerShell script that will check and make sure you have everything installed.

Create a normal React Native app

Your React Native for Windows app will live inside a normal React Native app, as a windows folder alongside your android folder.

npx @react-native-community/cli@latest init PizzaApp --version 0.78.3

0.78.3 is used here because there was a bug fix in the New Architecture template. Read more about that here.

Spin up a Windows app inside it

cd PizzaApp
npm install --save react-native-windows@0.78.2

Pick Legacy Architecture (UWP apps) or New Architecture (Win32 WinAppSDK)

Legacy Architecture

npx react-native init-windows --overwrite

New Architecture

Warning

Note that Fabric is still under development at the time of this writing.

npx react-native init-windows --template cpp-app --overwrite

Compile and run the Windows app

Still remaining in the project directory, run the following command:

npx react-native run-windows

You should see this pop up!

Start editing

Go to App.tsx and start your journey!