expo: Error starting tunnel: Error: Error: failed to start tunnel

I’ve been happily developing all day through the Expo tunnel feature until I restarted my project. I receive a valid exp:// link, but the device says “No experience can be found at …”. I have restarted my Expo XDE and tried starting through the exp CLI. I tried clearing the Expo XDE cache to no avail.

λ exp start --tunnel --dev
[exp] Making sure project is set up correctly...
[exp] Your project looks good!
[exp] Using project at <my project path>
[exp] Starting React Native packager...
[exp] Scanning 676 folders for symlinks in <my project path>\node_modules (17ms)
[exp] Loading dependency graph.
[exp] Running packager on port 19001.
[exp] Expo is ready.
[exp] You can scan this QR code:

<omitted>

[exp] Your URL is

exp://<my random url>.mariotacke.mobile.exp.direct:80

[exp] Logs for your project will appear below. Press Ctrl+C to exit.
[exp] Dependency graph loaded. 

The Expo XDE client log shows:

5:00:20 PM Starting React Native packager...
5:00:21 PM Scanning 676 folders for symlinks in <my project path>\node_modules (23ms)
5:00:22 PM Loading dependency graph.
5:00:22 PM Running packager on port 19001.
5:00:22 PM
5:00:26 PM Error starting tunnel: Error: Error: failed to start tunnel
5:00:26 PM Project opened! You can now use the "Share" or "Device" buttons to view your project.
5:00:34 PM Dependency graph loaded.

Any idea how to further debug this? It looks like the packager starts properly and the tunnel URL gets created.

I ran a netstat to look for any orphaned process that blocks the port, but I got nothing.

System: Windows 10 SDK: 17.0

About this issue

  • Original URL
  • State: closed
  • Created 7 years ago
  • Comments: 22 (4 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

Expo and react-devtools conflict!!! If you are using react-devtools, you must uninstall it: npm uninstall react-devtools --save-dev

npm uninstall react-devtools -g after 6 hours of trying everything…

The tunnel software we use is ngrok (https://ngrok.com) so I’d try testing ngrok out to make sure it works on your computer before spending more time. (XDE and exp have a LAN option where your project URLs contain LAN IP addresses instead of the exp.direct tunnel URLs.)

If ngrok works I’d recommend a few things while debugging:

  1. Close your project in XDE and open it again.
  2. Try to load the URL in your browser on your computer (switch out exp:// for http://). If that works, the development server is up and running.
  3. Try to load the URL from your phone’s browser to make sure your phone can reach your development server.
  4. Lastly, open the URL in the Expo client.

@gregbenner delete devtools works for me

This worked for me…

capture

I also had this problem today. It looks like sometimes ngrok can’t create the tunnel. But changing the Expo XDE Host to LAN instead of Tunnel solved it… Tks @ide

Interesting. I wonder where the mobile part comes from in the domain. For whatever reason, it is working again today (the tunnel proxy). Thanks for all of your help.

Not sure if this could be related to the exp.direct service not liking me for a few hours… I guess we can close this issue.