Prerequisites for running locally:
Download Expo Client app from App Store
- Once downloaded, create account/profile
- After starting the mobile app locally (/ontrack-app $ npm start) a browser window will open with a QR code. Point your Camera app at this QR code, and an option to open the app in Expo will appear.
Download ngrok - https://gist.github.com/wosephjeber/aa174fb851dfe87e644e
- tl;dr: ngrok mimics having a separate backend api endpoint
- There are two local servers we run when developing
- backend Express server (Node/Express)
- the mobile app client (Node/React-Native)
These may exist on different networks, which makes the API connection difficult. Ngrok creates a tunnel into our localhost at a specified port. For our project, run '$ ngrok http 8080' to forward a URL to our local backend server. Note this URL expires every 8 hours.