The preferred tool for creating React Native projects is create-react-native-app. This command-line tool was created by the React Native developer community and follows in the footsteps of the create-react-app tool. The goal of both create-react-app and create-react-native-app is to enable developers to hit the ground running with their projects. You should be able to issue a command that generates all of the boilerplate that's necessary for running your React or React Native app.

Without this type of tool, you end up spending an unnecessarily large amount of time configuring various aspects of your projects. First and foremost, developers want to build  applications. You can get fancy with configuration and optimization later on.

You'll want to install create-react-native-app globally because this tool isn't specific to any one project that you're working on—it gets the project started for you. Here's how you can do this:

npm install -g create-react-native-app

Once the installation is complete, you'll have a new create-react-native-app command available within your terminal. You can use this command to kickstart your new React Native project.