“could not connect to development server” error running React Native tutorial with Expo, suspecting Watchman

Question

New to react native and mobile dev, running into this problem:

I am running the React Native hello world from the Facebook Website using Expo CLI as the build tool. What I did was to install Expo, run expo init test , install cocoapods, and cd into the test directory and run expo start .

When I open the app on iOS simulator or my iPhone, I get "Could not connect to development server" after about 3-5 minutes in white screen (see screenshot).

In the Expo logs. It is notable that upon every startup I get the following error logs:

2019-08-25T21:49:21,474: [cli] Failed to open /Users/nsadeh/Library/LaunchAgents/com.github.facebook.watchman.plist for write: Not a directory

ERROR
21:49
Watchman:  watchman --no-pretty get-sockname returned with exit code=null, signal=SIGABRT, stderr= 2019-08-25T21:49:21,474: [cli] Failed to open /Users/nsadeh/Library/LaunchAgents/com.github.facebook.watchman.plist for write: Not a directory

I have already tried un- and reinstalling Watchman as well as Expo. Not sure what else to do.

To reproduce:

• macOS Mojave 10.14.6
• node v10.16.3
• expo 3.0.10
• Watchman 4.9.0
• react-native 0.59.10

Run expo init and from the top directory expo start .

Answer 1

Solution: turns out that postgreSQL left an unrelated LaunchAgents.plist file in my Library that was confusing Watchman. Renaming it resolved the issue.