Meet Doctor, a new React Native command

Lucas Bento

Lucas Bento

React Native Community

After over 20 pull requests from 6 contributors in the React Native Community, we're excited to launch react-native doctor, a new command to help you out with getting started, troubleshooting and automatically fixing errors with your development environment. The doctor command is heavily inspired by Expo and Homebrew's own doctor command with a pinch of UI inspired by Jest.

Here it is in action:

How it works

The doctor command currently supports most of the software and libraries that React Native relies on, such as CocoaPods, Xcode and Android SDK. With doctor we'll find issues with your development environment and give you the option to automatically fix them. If doctor is not able to fix an issue, it will display a message and a helpful link explaining how to fix it manually as the following:

Doctor command with a link to help on Android SDK's installation

Try it now

The doctor command is available as a part of React Native 0.62. However, you can try it without upgrading yet:

npx @react-native-community/cli doctor

What checks are currently supported

doctor currently supports the following checks:

  • Node.js (>= 8.3)
  • yarn (>= 1.10)
  • npm (>= 4)
  • Watchman (>= 4), used for watching changes in the filesystem when in development mode.

Specific to the Android environment:

  • Android SDK (>= 26), the software runtime for Android.
  • Android NDK (>= 19), the native development toolkit for Android.
  • ANDROID_HOME, environment variable required by the Android SDK setup.

And to the iOS environment:

  • Xcode (>= 10), IDE for developing, building and shipping iOS applications.
  • CocoaPods, library dependency management tool for iOS applications.
  • ios-deploy (optional), library used internally by the CLI to install applications on a physical iOS device.

Thanks

Huge thanks for the React Native Community for working on this, in particular @thymikee, @thib92, @jmeistrich, @tido64 and @rickhanlonii.