For many developers (of which I am a part), as soon as I met a repetable pattern, I have an irresistible urge to automate it.

Lately, I realized that was no expo template with ReScript up-to date that allow me to quickly start a sideproject or a POC. That's why I was interested in expo template creation.

Let's check out together the steps to realize the same template I made !

How it works

An Expo template is just an Expo app hosted on npm ! We just need to create a new Expo app with our criteria and publish our package !

Creation of our basic application

If it's not the case, you need to install expo-cli :

yarn global add expo-cli
# or
npm i -g expo-cli

We can now create our application :

expo init TemplateApp

We will choose the blank template for a minimal confguration.

Project configuration

It's important to configure correctly our package.json in order to publish our template on npm.

You need to make sure of several things:

• Remove the filed private: true
• Put an available package name
• Add a licence
• Fill the informations like the author, the description and some keywords

Now, let's setup ReScript.

ReScript Configuration

Let's install the essential package of a ReScript application. We need the React Native and React bindings.

yarn add rescript @rescript/react rescript-react-native
# or
npm i -S rescript @rescript/react rescript-react-native

Add to our package.json some handy scripts :

{
  "scripts": {
    "start": "expo start",
    "rescript:watch": "rescript build -with-deps -w",
    "rescript:build": "rescript build -with-deps",
    "rescript:clean": "rescript clean",
    "android": "expo start --android",
    "ios": "expo start --ios",
    "web": "expo start --web",
    "eject": "expo eject"
  }
}

The ReScript scripts will must run on another terminal instance (in addition to the expo server).

Then let's continue with the configuration file bsconfig.json that every ReScript project has :

{
  "name": "expo-rescript-template",
  "reason": {
    "react-jsx": 3
  },
  "bs-dependencies": ["@rescript/react", "rescript-react-native"],
  "bs-dev-dependencies": [],
  "package-specs": [
    {
      "module": "es6-global",
      "in-source": true
    }
  ],
  "sources": [
    {
      "dir": "src",
      "subdirs": true
    }
  ],
  "suffix": ".bs.js",
  "namespace": true,
  "bsc-flags": ["-bs-super-errors", "-bs-no-version-header", "-open Belt"],
  "ppx-flags": [],
  "warnings": {
    "number": "-44-30",
    "error": "+5"
  }
}

As I wrote in the bsconfig.json file, the main source will be the folder src that we need to create. To that, we can add our entry point, the App.res file :

open ReactNative

module StatusBar = {
  @module("expo-status-bar") @react.component
  external make: (~style: string) => React.element = "StatusBar"
}

let styles = {
  open Style

  StyleSheet.create({
    "container": viewStyle(
      ~flex=1.,
      ~backgroundColor="#fff",
      ~alignItems=#center,
      ~justifyContent=#center,
      (),
    ),
  })
}

@react.component
let make = () => {
  <View style={styles["container"]}>
    <Text> {"Open up App.res to start working on your app!"->React.string} </Text>
    <StatusBar style="auto" />
  </View>
}

let default = make

All that remains is to modify the App.js file to expose our ReScript compiled code :

export { default } from "./src/App.bs.js";

Clean and publication

Our template is ready ! But before publishing it, we need to create .npmignore file so as not to publish useless elements in our template :

.merlin
lib/
.expo/
.expo-shared/

Finally, let's get to publishing ! If it's the first time you publish a module, you will have to login :

npm login

Then you'll be able to publish the project

npm publish

And voila ! You can now use this template when you create a new expo application :

expo init MyApp --template expo-rescript-template