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 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.
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 favezilla
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.
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.
Run the app locally using the following commands at the root of your project:
yarn webto run the web appyarn iosto run the iOS app (will run in Expo Go)yarn adminto run the admin console- You will need to deploy Firebase functions in order to run the admin console
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
The NPE Toolkit is MIT licensed, as found in the LICENSE file.