Hooking up React Native to back-end (with Express)

Question

I made a UI with React Native, as well as a Cheerio.js scraper (with Cron Job to activate it once every day) I'll use to grab certain data from the web, so it can render in the UI. However, I have no idea how to link the two of them.

I am pretty sure I can do this with Express (which I am most comfortable with for the back-end), but can someone tell me exactly what I need to do to connect my front-end to a back-end?

Just in case, I am a junior dev (better on the front-end than the back-end) so please keep your answers simple. Even if your answers are more conceptual, rather than code-based, I'd really appreciate it.

Solution

Assuming you're communicating with an API built with Express then use fetch as described in the docs: https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/network.html