rn-lib-temp

A usable template for setting up a new React Native library. It's designed to reduce the hassle of configuration and help quickly start the project.

📚 React Native Library Template

This repository is an optimized React Native library boilerplate, designed to boost your library development process.🧑‍💻🔧 It's tailored for both bare React Native applications and Expo-created ones. This boilerplate is equipped with valuable tools, simplifying library development and ensuring high-quality code.

🌟 Features

  • Enforces code style with eslint, prettier, and TypeScript,
  • Precommit hooks checking code style and type issues,
  • GitHub Actions to aid in your development process,
  • Automated library deployments to npm and hassle-free versioning thanks to semantic-release,
  • Provides an example app for both bare React Native projects and Expo-managed ones,
  • jest setup is also available with example tests

📋 Requirements

Node 18 or greater is required. Development for iOS needs a Mac and Xcode.

🚀 Quick Start

To create a fresh project, just run:

npx rn-lib-temp init <projectName>

Before starting development, go to the directory where you created the template project and install all necessary dependencies with yarn:

yarn

For iOS only: Install required Pods for the bare React Native example app (example/fabric or example/paper):

yarn pod

💫 GitHub Actions

To use the GitHub Actions bundled with this boilerplate, you'll need to provide 2 secrets (refer to this page for more about secrets):

  • GH_TOKEN - a GitHub token with repo permissions (check docs for more on GitHub access tokens).
  • NPM_TOKEN - an npm token employed by semantic-release for automatic library deployment (see docs for info on npm access tokens).

Alternatively, remove workflows from the .github directory if you prefer not to use GitHub Actions.

🛠️ Library Development

🏗️ Project Structure

he repository uses the most common monorepo structure where the example directory contains the example app and the packages directory contains sources of the library itself, as well as, documentation and other packages (if necessary).

Library Source Files

By default, the resulting library will include files specified under the files key in the packages/<your-library-name>/package.json:

  • src directory - where you write all library source code,
  • dist directory - generated by react-native-builder-bob during the build process,
  • LICENSE - you should include your LICENSE file because it's not provided by default,
  • CHANGELOG.md - a file containing all version history with included changes, automatically generated by the semantic-release library,
  • README.md - readme file from the repository root directory

Library Dependencies

Included in the library
  • Usually for smaller dependencies or these which must point to the exact version,
  • Should be listed under dependencies field in the packages/<your-library-name>/package.json
Dependencies that must be installed by the user
  • Usually large dependencies or these, which are commonly used by other packages (such as react-native-reanimated),
  • Should be listed under peerDependencies field in the packages/<your-library-name>/package.json,
  • Should be installed as dependencies of the example app (added to the example/app/package.json)

All dependencies should be installed with yarn in order to ensure that yarn workspaces work properly.

📱 Example App

The example app is located in the example directory. Inside, you'll find three subdirectories:

  • app - Where the example app source code is located
  • fabric - Sources necessary to run the bare React Native app on Fabric (the New Architecture)
  • paper - Sources necessary to run the paper React Native app on Paper (the Old Architecture)
  • expo - Sources of the expo-managed app

If you don't need to include expo or fabric/paper React Native app example, you can just remove the corresponding directory.

Useful Commands

For launching the bare React Native example app:

yarn start|android|ios|pod

For the Expo React Native app:

yarn start|android|ios
  • start - starts metro client
  • android - starts example app on the Android emulator/device,
  • ios - starts example app on the iOS simulator/device,
  • pod - installs Pods required by example app native iOS dependencies.

🔄 Automatic deployments

The release.yaml workflow included in the project contains the auto deployment logic. By default, the deployment will be caused on the workflow dispatch action (manually from the GitHub Actions page). You can change this behavior by modifying the workflow triggers.