Jon Atkinson

A really quick guide to getting started with react-native in 2018.

Let’s see what we’re dealing with:

$ uname -a
Darwin hostname.local 17.4.0 Darwin Kernel Version 17.4.0: Sun Dec 17 09:19:54 PST 2017; root:xnu-4570.41.2~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64

If you don’t speak uname, that means OSX High Sierra.

The ‘Getting Started’ section of the official React Native documentation (at least at this point in time, the 0.54 release) recommends installing create-react-native-app with npm. This isn’t going to fly with npm@5 due to various reasons, which you can find in this total shit-show of a thread.

Unfortunately, I’ve already installed some node-related packages using brew. As such:

$ npm --version
5.6.0
$ node --version
v9.5.0

The workaround is to use yarn. Install it as follows:

$ npm install -g yarn

Once this is complete, you can start a sample application:

$ create-react-native-app test
$ cd test
$ yarn start

Inevitably, this will also break in seemingly ridiculous ways:

$ yarn start
yarn run v1.5.1
$ react-native-scripts start
16:51:43: Unable to start server
See https://git.io/v5vcn for more information, either install watchman or run the following snippet:
  sudo sysctl -w kern.maxfiles=5242880
  sudo sysctl -w kern.maxfilesperproc=524288

error An unexpected error occurred: "Command failed.

I’m faintly bemused. I suppose we need to tweak some kernel parameters?

$ sudo sysctl -w kern.maxfiles=5242880
Password:
kern.maxfiles: 49152 -> 5242880
$ sudo sysctl -w kern.maxfilesperproc=524288
kern.maxfilesperproc: 24576 -> 524288

Now let’s try again:

$ yarn start
yarn run v1.5.1
$ react-native-scripts start
16:58:17: Starting packager...
Packager started!

<.details omitted ...>

Okay, I’m quite tickled by the ANSI QR code. This can be opened with Expo on a mobile device.