Setup Confused about something? Let us know how we can improve: Submit

First of all we need to setup our new project, make sure you have Android Studio or XCode installed, you will need this to run the mobile app on a device or phone simulator. To keep things as simple as possible we are going to use Expo.

Make sure that you have a recent version of Node (10+) installed. If you are not sure, just type this in your terminal node --version

Let’s first install expo’s command line tools, feel free to replace npm with yarn if you prefer that over npm

npm install -g expo-cli

Run the following commands to create a new React Native project called "AwesomeChat"

expo init -t blank --name AwesomeChat cd AwesomeChat yarn add stream-chat-expo react-navigation@4.1.0 react-navigation-stack@2.1.0 expo install @react-native-community/netinfo@4.6.0 react-native-gesture-handler@1.5.6 react-native-reanimated@1.4.0 react-native-screens@2.0.0-alpha.12 react-native-safe-area-context@0.6.0 @react-native-community/masked-view@0.1.5 expo-permissions expo-image-picker expo-document-picker

Note: our SDK library works without Expo as well, more information is available on the Github documentation page.

To get all the chat functionality in this tutorial, you will need to get a free 4 weeks trial of Chat. No credit card is required.