Running Expo in WSL2

So you want to start a project in Expo, you are running Windows and WSL2, you follow the instructions and create you application like so:

$ npm install --global eas-cli
$ npx create-expo-app myExpoApp
$ cd myExpoApp
$ eas init --id your-id-here

Then as per the instructions on the readme.md you run:

$ npm install
$ npx expo start

And you are presented with the following screen:

Expo dev server output with a QR code

Great! Let’s scan the barcode and we should be up and running! But, No! You are presented with this:

Expo Go failing to connect to the dev server

Expo Go connection error details

This is my solution to get around this issue:

$ npx expo start --tunnel

But rather than entering this every time, I update my package.json with an entry for start-wsl

package.json scripts with a start-wsl entry

$ npm run-script start-wsl

If you are wondering why I don’t just update start to include --tunnel it is because not everyone in my team is going to be using WSL2 and I don’t want to annoy those on Windows without WSL2, nor those on linux or MacOS.