The NPE Toolkit

The NPE Toolkit is a set of libraries, guides, blueprints, and sample code, to enable rapidly building 0-1 applications on iOS, Android and web.

As a 0-1 app builder, you should spend your time building the features that make your app special! The Toolkit provides out-of-the box functionality for common app flows, including login, settings, profiles, onboarding, and notifications, so you can focus on your app's unique value proposition.

We’ve also made it easy to customize the screens, flows, and behaviors as your app grows, as it’s not realistic to have a one-size-fits-all UI experience that will work for all apps and at all stages. To the extent possible, tools in the Toolkit are independently adoptable. Specifically all pre-built user-facing screens are easy to swap out with your own version as your product matures.

The Toolkit is built on top of React Native on the client side (including React Native web for web applications). We will support multiple server platforms in the Toolkit, but to start we are building on top of Firebase as it has higher-level services for authentication, data access, storage, and managed deployment of server-side functionality that give us a strong baseline to build upon.

See the CONTRIBUTING file for how to help out.

🚧 🚧 The NPE Toolkit is Under Construction 🚧🚧

The New Product Experimentation team at Meta has been using the Toolkit libraries to rapidly prototype and test new application ideas since early 2022.

We've started the Github project in the Meta Incubator to iterate in the open, but there are lot of rough edges and as the Toolkit isn't yet ready for broad usage yet.

Please reach out to the NPE Toolkit team if you are interested in becoming one of our first external users.

Getting started

Create your new Toolkit app from a template

To run your first build, run the following (replacing your-toolkit-app with the name of your app):

git clone https://github.com/facebookincubator/npe-toolkit.git
yarn create expo-app your-toolkit-app -t ./npe-toolkit/templates/faves

Because the toolkit is under active, daily development and hasn't cut an initial release, you need to clone the GitHub source code to build apps on the Toolkit.

Setting up Firebase

Current Toolkit app templates require a Firebase backend to log in and store data. To set up Firebase for your project, follow the steps at Configuring Firebase - this should take under 10 minutes.

We're evaluating whether it makes sense to deploy a common project so that when you first spin up a Toolkit app you'll have a backend — this has a lot of pros and cons, so for now you need to create your own Firebase project.

Running the app

Run the app locally using the following commands at the root of your project:

• yarn web to run the web app
• yarn ios to run the iOS app (will run in Expo Go)
• yarn admin to run the admin console
  • You will need to deploy Firebase functions in order to run the admin console

If you have a different directory structure

The default app setup expects your app's directory to be a sibling of the npe-toolkit directory.

If you are installing to a different location, you need to create a symlink peer, using the following command:

ln -snf $PATH_TO_NPE_TOOLKIT $YOUR_APP_DIR/../npe-toolkit

(future plans) How apps will be created in General Availability

When we're in GA, the toolkit will be packaged into an NPM package and you can get started without cloning the NPE Toolkit Github project.

It will be a single step to get started, calling either

> npx create-expo-app your-app-name -t @npe-toolkit/template-name

or

> yarn create expo-app your-app-name -t @npe-toolkit/template-name

License

The NPE Toolkit is MIT licensed, as found in the LICENSE file.