How to publish a React Native application to Expo

Expo is a platform developers use to test and develop React Native applications. Expo has an App store, similar to the Apple App or Google Play store. We can deploy our React Native applications that we build with Expo to the Expo App store. So, let's walk through the steps.

Step 1: Create an account

First, we create the Expo account to publish our application. We access the following link:

https://expo.dev/signup

This directs us to the "Sign Up" page where we can create a new account. The page looks like this:

Once we create an account, we must log in. After we log in, this is what our dashboard should look like:

Step 2: Deploy our application

Now that our account creation and configuration are complete, we can set up and deploy our application. So, we create our React Native application and open it in Visual Studio (VS) code. After that, we open the terminal by pressing the Ctrl+` keyboard shortcut. The VS code window looks like this:

After this, we log in to the Expo command line interface (CLI) using the terminal. We enter the following command to install Expo CLI:

Step 3: Logging in

Now, we log in to the Expo App store through the terminal using the following command:

When we run this command, we are prompted to enter the username and password.

We must remember that these credentials are the ones we used to create our Expo account. After we enter our credentials, we are logged in to our Expo account. Here, we just have to publish our React Native application by running the following command:

Congratulations! We successfully deployed our React Native application to the Expo App store.