How to Run iOS in React Native

We will introduce how to run iOS in React Native and change the default simulator for iOS.

Run iOS in React Native

When making changes to our already developed app, adding new features, or developing a new application, we need to see how our code displays results. React Native gives us the option to run our under-development app using a simple command in CLI.

We can even run our React Native application on Android or iOS using this command. We can even use the simulator to view our application on different Android or iOS devices.

We will install expo-cli using the npm command.

# react native
npm install -g expo-cli

If you use yarn instead of npm, you can use the following command.

# react native
yarn global add expo-cli

Now we will create a new React Native project using the expo command.

# react native
expo init MyApp

This command will create a new project, MyApp. This command will work on npm and yarn users. We will go into our project directory and start the app using the npm command.

# react native
cd MyApp
npm start

If you are using yarn.

# react native
cd MyApp
yarn start

We can also start our app by running the expo command.

# react native
cd MyApp
expo start

Once we have created our new React Native application, we can even use a simulator to run our app on any Android or iOS version or connect our phone to run our app. But in this tutorial, we will use the simulator to run our application on different versions of the iOS device.

We can use --simulator in our command to run our application in the desired iOS version available in the simulator.

Using the following command, let’s run our application on iPhone 11.

# react native
npx react-native run-ios --simulator="iPhone 11"

This command will run our newly created React Native application on iPhone 11. If we like to check which devices are available in the simulator, we can run the following command.

# react native
xcrun simctl list devices

We can also define our custom commands using npm. We will add a launch-app command to the scripts in the package.json file.

# react native
"launch-app": "react-native run-ios --simulator \"iPhone 11\""

We can use this command to always run our application on iPhone 11 using npm.

# react native
npm run launch-app

In this way, we can easily run our application in any iOS version we want using the simulator and some easy commands in React Native.