React Native CLI

Command line tools that ship with react-native in form of the @react-native-community/cli package.

It exposes react-native binary, so your can call yarn react-native or npx react-native directly from your project.

Note: CLI has been extracted from core react-native as a part of "Lean Core" effort. Please read this blog post for more details.

Contents

• Compatibility
• Documentation
• About
• Creating a new React Native project
  • Using npx (recommended)
  • Using global CLI (legacy)
• Usage in an existing React Native project
• Updating the CLI
• Maintainers
• License

Compatibility

Our release cycle is independent of react-native. We follow semver and here is the compatibility table:

@react-native-community/cli	react-native
^2.0.0	^0.60.0
^1.0.0	^0.59.0

Documentation

• configuration
• commands
• plugins
• init
• autolinking

About

This repository contains tools and helpers for React Native projects in form of a command line tool. There's been quite some confusion around that since the extraction from React Native core. Let's clear them up:

• There are currently two CLIs:
  • @react-native-community/cli – the one used directly by react-native. That makes it a transitive dependency of your project.
  • react-native-cli – an optional global convenience package, which is a proxy to @react-native-community/cli and global installation helper. Please consider it legacy, because it's not necessary anymore.
• When we say "the CLI" we mean @react-native-community/cli.
• We update the CLI independently of React Native itself. Please see how to use the latest version.
• This is a monorepo to keep stuff organized.

We're actively working to make any indirections gone.

Creating a new React Native project

There are two ways to start a React Native project.

Using npx (recommended)

Available since [email protected]

This method is preferred if you don't want to install global packages.

npx react-native init MyApp

Using global CLI (legacy)

You'll need to install a global module react-native-cli and follow instructions there.

We strongly encourage you to only use global react-native-cli for bootstrapping new projects. Use local version for everything else.

You can find out more about init command from the documentation

Usage in an existing React Native project

Once you're inside an existing project, a local react-native binary will be available for you to use. Feel free to use Yarn to call it directly.

Example running start command in terminal:

yarn react-native start
# or:
npx react-native start
# or
node ./node_modules/.bin/react-native start

You can also add npm scripts to call it with whichever package manager you use:

{
  "scripts": {
    "start": "react-native start"
  }
}

Updating the CLI

Because we release independently of react-native, it happens that you may be locked on a version without fixes for bugs that affect you. Here's how to get it sorted:

1. If you use lock files (yarn.lock or package-lock.json) - find the @react-native-community/cli entry, remove it, run yarn install / npm install once again.
2. If you don't use lock files – remove node_modules and run yarn install / npm install again.
3. Run yarn list @react-native-community/cli or npm list @react-native-community/cli and verify you're on the latest version.

After performing these steps you should be on the latest CLI version. Feel free to do it once in a while, because we release often.

Maintainers

• Michał Pierzchała (@thymikee) - Callstack
• Mike Grabowski (@grabbou) - Callstack
• Kacper Wiszczuk (@esemesek) - Callstack

License

Everything inside this repository is MIT licensed.