The resurrection of a year-old React-Native app

I got an upgrade project. React Native application which has not been released for a year with the last commit on 29/02/2020.

The task, as simple as it might sound, is a challenging one—get the app compiling for Andriod and upgrade it to the newest (0.63.4) React Native version.

You guessed it right—the app does not build. The team who inherited the app from another team are full-stackers but after spending a few days on it decided their time is better used in other parts of the projects and outsourced the compile-fix and upgrade to yours truly.

Let’s crack on it.

As a first step, naturally, I git-cloned the repository into my main-workstation, installed dependencies and tried to run it:

$ npm install 
$ react-native run-android

As expected, a bunch of errors. I could have started working on errors in my main-workstation, however, there’s a big gotcha with React Native environments—they are hard to isolate.

I have a lot of different projects in play which ranges in versions for php, node, python and other supporting toolings. With docker, these are easy to isolate project environments, meaning all projects sit in the same machine but run in isolation.

React Native is challenging to isolate and I’m yet to find a good docker container which can support 1+N React Native projects with different project toolings (node, java) whit out sacrificing speed of development. That's right, people highly underestimate how much admin-time it takes to deal with docker.

As a result, I run React Native in the OS. I was certain my main-workstation will be to new for the year-old application, and I did not want to change anything in my OS setup.

It’s good that exactly for such purpose I have a spare MacBook which I factory-reset and setup project by project.

Fresh macOS Big Sur, install brew, environment toolings and let’s take a closer look at the repository.

# Get brew in, then...
$ brew install --cask android-studio
$ brew install --cask android-platform-tools
$ brew install --cask adoptopenjdk
$ brew install react-native-cli
$ brew install nvm
$ brew install yarn
$ xcode-select --install
# Optional
$ brew install alacritty
$ brew install zsh