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I recently initialized a new bare react-native project(initialized as version 0.70.6). And now I am facing this issue on my old react-native project.
And I am getting an error when the app runs. Error is error: src/res/images/play.png: Cannot find module 'expo-asset/tools/hashAssetFiles'
I am posting a solution to my question. Because if anyone is facing this without knowing the difference between npx react-native start vs react-native start
Solution: npx react-native start instead of react-native start
Explain: (Reference: https://stackoverflow.com/a/62067116/9877424)
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.
The global version is no longer recommended
npx executes either from a local node_modules/.bin, or from a central cache, installing any packages needed in order for to run.
When you run npx ... it picks up the cli package that is part of your project dependency
new to react native expo.
running on
node.js version 16.16.0,
npm verison 8.11.0
expo version 5.4.12 (after running npm install --global expo-cli)
when initiating a new project using
expo init
(choosing blank)
I'm getting a very large project, 190MB!
Looking into the project i see that the reason for that is node_modules,
I tried to set up the env. in 2 different PCs and getting the same thing.
for some reason i cant see any discussions on it,
can someone please tell me what am i doing wrong?
Thank you
node_modules is always a really large folder. It has all the dependencies of your app including the expo and react native libaries. When you build your app for production your actual binary will be a fraction of that. My node_modules folder for a recent React Native app was about 1 GB but the actual app itself ended up only being about 50MB.
I have an application which runs on react-native 0.49.3
I want to upgrade to the latest version which is v0.57.4.
Should I incrementally update it? For example 0.49 -> 0.50 -> 0.51 etc
Or I can just update it to to the latest version?
Do you suggest using react-native-git-upgrade or rn-diff?
My advice is to upgrade to the latest version. There will be enough dependency issues anyway so you're best dealing with them only once.
From the React Native upgrade page
(https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/upgrading)
you can run:
npm install -g react-native-git-upgrade
npm install -g #react-native-community/cli
react-native-git-upgrade
UPDATE 2:
The new command is
npx react-native upgrade
but I believe this is best for upgrading from more recent versions. If you have older versions, the following upgrade process still applies.
UPDATE:
I've never had a problem before with upgrades, but recently joined a project where we upgraded from an old copy of React Native 0.44.3 to a newer version (first to 0.57.8, then to 0.55.4, then to 0.58.3 while struggling with stability) and discovered that it's not always as easy as running those commands. Be warned that this could be a long, tedious process, especially if you have not upgraded regularly and have a long gap between upgrades. In this case, it was 18 months since they had upgraded.
First, there have been changes to the upgrade process itself (react-native upgrade, to now react-native-git-upgrade) itself. So, if you're using a version that's a year old or more there could be some manual discrepancies that you'll have to go through. Some are spelled out after running the react-native-git-upgrade command, and some are not. I was amazed at the number of people on Stack Overflow going through the same undocumented circular issues of a seemingly innocent upgrade. I was not expecting that. I'd be OK with Facebook not adding any features for 6 months and simplifying the upgrade process before moving on.
Second, make sure your version of React Native uses the right dependencies. Later versions of the upgrade tool (react-native-git-upgrade) try to account for this, but double check at https://github.com/react-native-community/react-native-releases/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md to see if the version of RN that you're upgrading to requires a specific dependency. Some do while others do not.
Next, library hades is real, depending on how big your project is. In our case, several modules in use in our 0.44.3 version have now been deprecated or no longer maintained or even work differently with the later versions of RN. I didn't consider this enough when starting this process. This caused several instances of code rewrite just to upgrade!! Yikes!
Also, just as some versions of React Native require specific versions of dependencies, other modules require specific versions of some dependencies. Worse, sometimes these are incompatible and conflicting versions, of various libraries. Save some time and write a user story or two to account for this. Go through every module you're using and see if there are any compatibility statements on their GitHub page. Some Readme files will tell you to use certain versions of their module with certain versions of React Native. Others won't and you may find out later there are requirements. But even going through this process and anticipating issues, you'll thank yourself later.
Once you're up to date and stable, consider upgrading regularly to minimize the upgrade nightmare that I just went through.
You will need #react-native-community/cli to upgrade to the latest version of react-native, sadly not mentioned anywhere.
npm install -g #react-native-community/cli
Install react-native-git-upgrade
npm install -g react-native-git-upgrade
Now go to your project.
cd your-react-native-project
Now you can run the upgrade command.
react-native upgrade
Just change the path to the project for which you want to upgrade the react native version and then run this command:
react-native upgrade
and after running this command you will see some questions. Type n to discard the change to that file or type y if you want to modify that file.
It will automatically install the latest version of react-native for your project.
More info at:
https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/upgrading
OR
You can upgrade react native version by this simple step:
1- Just go to package.json file of your project
2- After that, look for these lines
"dependencies": {
"react-native": "0.57.8",
}
3- Change the react-native version to any version that you want to upgrade to in "dependencies".
4- After this run npm install and react native version will be upgraded for your project.
I would recommend using this tool (upgrade helper) which allows you to compare your current react native version and latest react native version.
Also, It's good to upgrade react-native frequently to stay up to date with the latest version and make the upgrade process easy.
https://react-native-community.github.io/upgrade-helper/
I recommend visiting this page: https://github.com/react-native-community/rn-diff-purge
because you can see the list of exactly what changes in each version. I find it's simpler to manually change config settings after starting from your version that is proven to work properly via react-native run-android and react-native run-ios.
It sounds like a horrible task, but it's not very difficult for your fingers or brain to remove red lines and add green lines--at least compared to alternatives such as Googling to sort out horrific error messages in the Android/iOS build systems.
I also believe that it's a good idea to manually change config settings for example going from 0.44 to 0.59 because you get more of an opportunity to see exactly what is changing in each version. You'll see the changes are reasonable and generally have bearing on fostering future automation and increasing the build systems' robustness and aversion to breakage.
Additionally, changes were implemented in RN 0.59 that makes react-native upgrade better, and in addition to my additional statement, the whole 0.59 release is pretty massive and important for future: http://facebook.github.io/react-native/blog/#upgrading-to-059
I'm not even going to talk about react-native upgrade or react-native-git-upgrade because I find those to be generally a source of nightmares especially if you get into react-native unlink and react-native link.
You can update to the latest version directly, I'd recommend to do it with react-native-git-upgrade, but do be careful to read the update release notes on the versions up to yours, they have some notes about things you should do manually that the upgrade will not. You can find the notes here: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/releases
The notes are usually on top in the changelogs, I know the latest releases had some of those and gave me some work to update from 0.54 recently so be aware.
In case there are changes then you can either update them manually by copying and pasting from the changes in the page or you can do it with the React Native CLI upgrade command by running:
npx react-native upgrade
As explained in the docs: https://reactnative.dev/docs/upgrading
react-native upgrade
npm i react-native#{{VERSION}}
npm i react#{{VERSION}}
https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/upgrading
https://react-native-community.github.io/upgrade-helper/?from=0.59.9&to=0.61.0
Even with using the new upgrade helper https://react-native-community.github.io/upgrade-helper/ I still run into a bunch of issues and it takes forever to debug them. The best and most reliable way I have found to upgrade after react-native core teams make big changes like adding fast-refresh or flipper that involves a lot of xcode related changes it just start from scratch.
create new repo
npx react-native init newProject
STEP 1 -
make sure the new app runs properly so you know if you have an xcode/react native package issues that need to be upgraded. I know I ran into an xcode issue that forced me to upgrade to a new mac os version.
STEP 2 - pull up old projects xcworkspace or xcodeproj if you are not using any custom pods and just copy over the important stuff like the signing stuff and potentially any custom build scripts you have. I have custom fonts so I pull that over
STEP 3 - copy over app specific code, think app folder or src and any files that live in the root of your project.
STEP 4 - Run npm install and pod install if you have custom pods
STEP 5 - Important not to just paste over the App.js/tsx file but instead just render a simple view with text in it. If your app will run here then it means all your npm/pods are configured properly. Usually I run into a bunch of error in this step which require me to upgrade npm/pods to new version to deal with breaking changes in react-native
STEP 5.a - One by one add in each line from your original App.js/tsx file and testing if anything breaks. Sometimes its useful to reset your metro cache in between changes and removing the build folders inside of ios and android during debugging. Also its very helpful to use the chrome debugger stop on exception functionality here so you know where the issues are coming from
STEP 6 - copy over .git folder from previous project that lives in the root of your project so you can keep your version history or just create a new git repo if you dont care about this.
I have upgraded RN to newer versions in a couple of hours using this method multiple times. I typically write myself some notes while I do it to speed to up the process next time I need to upgrade. Good Luck!
npx react-native upgrade
Should do all the work for you.
use cammand npx react-native upgrade
if you are facing errors it's due to some deprecated packages.So comment all pages and in route and step by step add your pages and replace your deprecated packages with new .
And also use this update helper 'https://react-native-community.github.io/upgrade-helper/'
You can Upgrade with 4 simple step
npm install -g #react-native-community/CLI
npm install -g react-native-git-upgrade
cd your-react-native-project
react-native upgrade
Thanks :)
I have a question about upgrading react-native version.
We have some choices to upgrade but I don't know differences.
1) react-native upgrade
2) react-native-git-upgrade
3) npm install react-native#latest --save then react-native run-android or react-native run-ios
I used third way for my project because I need to maintain my files in the android folder like MainActivity.java, MainApplication.java, AndroidManifest etc.
could you please describe differences between these ways?
TL;DR
First, you should check out the latest options for upgrading from facebook.
If none of those work for you:
Increase version of react-native in your package.json
run npm install (or yarn if you're using that)
run react-native upgrade or possibly react-native upgrade --legacy
Explanation
Here I address each of the upgrade options you asked about.
1) npm install react-native#latest --save then react-native
run-android or react-native run-ios
As you probably know, the run-* commands here don't perform any type of upgrade.
Meanwhile, npm install --save <library>#<version> is just the command to put a library into your package.json, or update the version of an existing library. This is how you would upgrade the version of any typical library in your package.json. If that's all there was to upgrading RN, there would be no fuss amongst the community about the difficulty of upgrading. There's much more work to do.
If this is the only step you take in upgrading, the new version of react-native will be downloaded to node_modules, but it should fail and complain about many things:
react dependency needs to be upgraded as well
Files under your ios and android directories will not be in the state which the latest react-native expects. For example, if you upgrade from react-native 0.52 to 0.59, you will have gradle 2 while your react-native library expects gradle 4.
Your other dependencies might not work with your newer version of RN. For example, here is a warning from npm install after I did my upgrade:
npm WARN react-native-markdown-renderer#3.2.8 requires a peer of react-native#^0.50.4 but none is installed. You must install peer dependencies yourself.
As you can see, I need to upgrade native-markdown-renderer as well, since it requires RN 0.50 but I've upgraded to 0.59. Some libraries might work in this mismatched state, but that is your risk to take.
2) react-native-git-upgrade
From what I understand, the RN team had too many problems with this product and no longer want us using it. I'm guessing this is why it doesn't work at all for most of us.
3) react-native upgrade
This will update the version of react-native in your package.json, but then also bring you through a set of guided CLI prompt as it modifies the files in your ios and android directories. But how will this guide handle conflicts between the new incoming files and your existing files? You likely have some changes in there you want to keep.
Newer versions of react-native upgrade are said to allow you to perform a diff and merge, but I haven't seen that. When I ran it, it intended to clobber my entire old file with a new one, and it showed me the path on my local file system to the "new" version that would overwrite my old one. So I used my own diffing tool to just diff between the new incoming file and my existing file. If you lack a diff tool, I use p4Merge. So, as you go through the CLI guide, just do a diff between your existing file and the path to the new file it gives you, and do that one by one, adding necessary new lines to your files. If you made some changes, answer "no" to the prompt so that you can keep your old file (with the modifications you just made). If you don't have anything worth keeping in the file, answer "yes" and let the guide simply overwrite and clobber your old file.
When this command is complete, your ios and android directories will be updated. For example, gradle will be upraded from Gradle 2 to Gradle 4.
You may hit the bug I did, which causes this command to keep upgrading you to an OLDER version rather than the latest. In this case, you need to instead run: react-native upgrade --legacy
If it's a smaller project just create a new react native project using 'npx react-native init yourprojectname --version X.XX.Xt' and then copy the source folder of your older project into the new project. Then try running it in android or ios using 'npx react-native run-android' or 'npx react-native run-ios'. If there are any runtime errors but no build errors, then update the npm packages accordingly. Note: This is applicable for small projects because larger projects may contain many 3rd party dependencies. :)
I tried react-native-git-upgrade and then deleted node_modules and then npm install
it works for me!
https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/upgrading
The upgrade approaches mentioned in the other answers do work in many cases, but I have experienced many other cases where there are too many errors.
From my experience, in these cases the best approach is to create a new project in the new version, and copy the source files to the new project.
In React Native, what is the difference between:
react-native-git-upgrade
react-native upgrade
yarn upgrade react-native
Just deleting node_modules, bumping the version number in package.json, removing yarn.lock or package-lock.json and doing an npm install or yarn install
What is the preferred method, advantages/disadvantages? Are some outdated? Only relevant for certain versions?
I want to love React Native, but when it comes to versions, it is absolute hell. 0.44.1 is the only version that has consistently worked for me without random fatal errors on startup.
As you can see in here in the official react-native document, the best way for upgrading react-native is using react-native-git-upgrade if you create your project with react-native init. If you started you app with create-react-native-app please read here.
Because React Native projects built with native code are essentially made up of an Android project, an iOS project, and a JavaScript project, upgrading can be rather tricky.
Advantage: The module react-native-git-upgrade provides a one-step operation to upgrade the source files with a minimum of conflicts. Under the hood, it consists in 2 phases:
First, it computes a Git patch between both old and new template
files,
Then, the patch is applied on the user's sources.