Convert to a plugin

Changing this project to a react-native plugin, would mean that after installing it locally into project dependencies, you can run react-native create-bridge instead of having global executable.

Would be easier to version, adapt to breaking react-native changes and work across projects.

Since this is not a super documented feature, I would love to send a PR adding this.

Would you be / other users open to having such workflow instead?

[grabbou]

@andrerfneves I am busy in upcoming days (travelling), so I am happy to help you as much as I can to land this!

To start - it’s really simple.

React Native CLI has a built-in mechanism for detecting plugins. In order to be detected as a plugin, your package has to meet the following criteria:

• it has to start with react-native-*
• it has to be present in package.json of an arbitrary React Native project
• it has to include rnpm.plugin key in package.json, that points to a main plugin file, e.g.:

{
  "rnpm": {
     "plugin:" "./src/abc.js"
  }
}

Path should be relative to your root directory as we will resolve it later.

The plugin entry file (in our context - src/abc.js) has to be a file with module.exports that is either an object or an array of objects. Here’s is a flow type describing its shape. You can see it in action by checking bundle command definition. Options you define there are later used by the react-native cli to validate user input and print nice --help. For further reference, you can check other commands, like link or run-ios to see how they define the options.

In order to test it, you can just npm link your package to the testing react-native project. Don’t forget to add it to package.json dependencies.

[peggyrayzis]

I absolutely love this idea and would gladly accept a PR! I didn’t even know custom plugins were an option so thank you so much for suggesting this.

I’m going to post on Twitter to see if anyone has any objections, although I don’t think anyone will 😀