Downloading Project Files on New Project in XDE hangs

If you have a problem like this:

I clicked on the “new tab project” button and it shows me “Downloading project files…” popup. It’s been a while now, can you please advise here?

Here are some things to try:
(1) Make sure you are upgraded to the latest version of XDE.

You can see what the latest release is here:

(2) You might have a flaky internet connection and XDE is having trouble downloading the files to get a new project started

Try quitting XDE and reopening it.

(3) You might have a corrupted XDE cache of the project files somehow

Try the XDE cache from the (?) Help menu.

(4) You might need to configure your proxy settings using environment variables.

More info here: Exponent SDK v12.0.0 is now available | by Brent Vatne | Exposition

(5) If all that fails, you can manually download the project files

Here is a Gist that explains how to do that.

(6) If none of those things help, join our Slack ( https://slack.expo.io/ ) and ask in the LOCKED: General or #help channels.

Hope this helps!

I can’t create a new project with XDE.
The err is as follow:
Couldn’t connect to the server, check your internet connection.
It seems that something wrong with my internet connection, however, I can watch videoes on youtube and visit your website at the same time. What’s more, i found out that I can’t download the latest XDE from https://xde-updates.exponentjs.com/download/mac
Something about my internet:
I’m in China, I CAN visit your website nomoally, but I can’t visit google or youtube until with VPN. I have VPN service, but no matter how hard i tried, I coundn’t create a new project with XDE successfully.
any help, thanks

My past experience of China mainland internet connectivity is that S3 is often (usually) completely blocked. And the way that S3/CloudFront works (selection of endpoint etc) does not necessarily help folks who want to VPN. This is comparable to but not the same as the issues I have experienced in Indonesia.

My own company has has to use completely different CDNs to make it’s content available to folks in China mainland: and amongst the global ones, we have had best successes with CloudFlare. Basically, S3/CloudFront does not work at all in China (unless one hosts in the AWS China region), so any content provided via that system is effectively inaccessible to Chinese users. For an extra fee one can pay CloudFlare to bypass all the problems, and it works pretty well.

This raises an important point for Expo devs and product managers: in your bubble of perfect internet connectivity, don’t forget users in the bulk of the rest of the world with their dodgy and flakey internet connections, let’s make sure the code can cope with download rates of <1k per second and doesn’t give up too easily. Design in support for “trickle” downloads and allow that it may not be possible to download a complete update to the in-app content bundle during a single session. Get this right and it will be possible to distribute Expo-developed apps worldwide: otherwise, folks should be aware that Expo developed apps are only suitable for use in major economies.

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