Starting to work with React Native on Linux

August 14, 2023

When working with JavaScript, using a package manager to install dependencies becomes necessary. As of 2023, you would either use Yarn or Npm as your package manager.

I am using Endeavour OS, which is based on Arch Linux. I mostly work on Front-end projects with React or Next.js and my personal favorite package manager is Yarn. To install it on my system, I simply run;

sudo pacman -S yarn

When starting to work on React Native projects, I needed to run the following command;

npx create-expo-app tic-tac-toe

With only Yarn installed on my system, I couldn't run it. I didn't want to install Npm along with Yarn, so I tried to install Npx with Yarn without success.

Another alternative was to run

yarn create expo-app tic-tac-toe

But this command failed with an error on 'Spawn Npm ENOENT'. I couldn't found a solution for this problem.

In the end, I was left with no choice so I decided to install npm. What's the harm? I just needed it to install npx, afterall.

I installed Npm on with;

sudo pacman -S npm

To my surprise, Npx command was already ready to use! I run create-expo-app as soon as possible and it was successful.

I thought that was it, but I faced similar error message when I tried to run npm run android command. The exact output was this;

Starting Metro Bundler
Failed to resolve the Android SDK path. Default install location not found: /home/naphteine/Android/sdk. Use ANDROID_HOME to set the Android SDK location.
Failed to resolve the Android SDK path. Default install location not found: /home/naphteine/Android/sdk. Use ANDROID_HOME to set the Android SDK location.
Error: spawn adb ENOENT
Error: spawn adb ENOENT

But this error message seemed quite clear. I didn't have Android Studio installed, so it should be because of that, I thought.

Next step was to install Android Studio. There was an android-studio package on AUR but it was based on 2022.3.1.18-1 version. I thought it was old version, but when I checked with Android Studio website I learned that it was the latest version. I could still install from the website, but I couldn't find any source actually recommends this approach. I ended up with;

yay -S android-studio

But it turns out this wasn't necessary at all. All I had to do was;

npm start

And with that, my Expo server was running. All I had to do was connecting my phone with Expo Go app. With just scanning QR code and opening my firewall for that port, everything was working!

Cheers, -G.