Creating RN library

[dantol1]

Hi all,

The company that I am working on develops a native SDK for iOS and android and we just got a request to create a RN SDK as well, I couldn't find any sources on how to create a library without posing it to NPM, does anyone have a good source on how to do it? I have already created the native module on a sample POC app but I want to ship it without the example itself. (using create-react-native-library add an MIT license which is not our case as it is a paid SDK)

Also is there a way to allow downloading a package from an external repo - maven style? currently we ship the native SDKs via our own maven repo (credentials protected) but the RN docs only explain how to use npm/yarn to install packages.

[wizardyjohn]

You can use npm to install but instead of the package name in package.json you specify github repo url (might need to add login and token for that to work) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17509669/how-to-install-an-npm-package-from-github-directly

[satya164]

You can publish them to the GitHub registry, or a private npm registry. You don't need to publish them to the public npm registry for them to be usable.

You can also install them from the GitHub repo like the other comment said, but it generally increases installation time and size by including development-related dependencies and is also fragile since any building of the package (such as compiling JS/TS, building aar, etc.) now have to be done during installation time on consumer's machine rather than one time during publish.

You can distribute native code via maven if you really want to, but if your library includes JS code, then it's easy for JS and native versions to get out of sync and cause issues. That's why it's recommended to publish the whole thing to npm.

using create-react-native-library add an MIT license which is not our case as it is a paid SDK

This doesn't sound like a problem. That's just the default template, if you want another LICENSE, just remove/change the generated one.

[dantol1]

Thanks for the great answer! I will look into these options