You will need to build React Native from source if you want to work on a new feature/bug fix, try out the latest features which are not released yet, or maintain your own fork with patches that cannot be merged to the core.
Assuming you have the Android SDK installed, run android
to open the Android SDK Manager.
Make sure you have the following installed:
build.gradle
)build.gradle
)Point Gradle to your Android SDK: either have $ANDROID_SDK
and $ANDROID_NDK
defined, or create a local.properties file in the root of your react-native checkout with the following contents:
Example:
First, you need to install react-native
from your fork. For example, to install the master branch from the official repo, run the following:
Alternatively, you can clone the repo to your node_modules
directory and run npm install
inside the cloned repo.
Add gradle-download-task
as dependency in android/build.gradle
:
:ReactAndroid
project #Add the :ReactAndroid
project in android/settings.gradle
:
Modify your android/app/build.gradle
to use the :ReactAndroid
project instead of the pre-compiled library, e.g. - replace compile 'com.facebook.react:react-native:0.16.+'
with compile project(':ReactAndroid')
:
If you use 3rd-party React Native modules, you need to override their dependencies so that they don't bundle the pre-compiled library. Otherwise you'll get an error while compiling - Error: more than one library with package name 'com.facebook.react'
.
Modify your android/app/build.gradle
and replace compile project(':react-native-custom-module')
with:
Building from source can take a long time, especially for the first build, as it needs to download ~200 MB of artifacts and compile the native code. Every time you update the react-native
version from your repo, the build directory may get deleted, and all the files are re-downloaded. To avoid this, you might want to change your build directory path by editing the ~/.gradle/init.gradle
file: