If you’re like me, when you saw how easy debugging React Native applications was, you were mind-blown. Setting breakpoints in Google Chrome to control your iOS device seemed like magic and sorcery. But if you’re like me, you also distrust magic in programming. Magic must be understood so that it…

**THIS IS A DRAFT PUBLICATION AND IS NOT COMPLETE NOR GRAMMAR CHECKED** In this article I go a little under the hood in exploring React Native’s Network Protocol. I use the word “Protocol” loosely here, because I don’t believe the current network traffic conforms to any spec per say, but…

Debugging React Native is really easy. But what if you want to debug React Native’s Packager? Use node-insecptor node-inspector & node --debug-brk ./node_modules/react-native/packager/packager.js It will give you an output like so Debugger listening on port 5858 Node Inspector v0.11.1 Visit http://127.0.0.1:8080/?ws=127.0.0.1:8080&port=5858 to start debugging. Once you visit the URL above (and hit play on the debugger), you will get full debugging support

I’ve been working on a React Native project recently and came to the point where I needed to setup a testing framework. To accomplish this, I needed to deep-dive into React Native’s asset pipeline and runtime environments to better understand what’s going on behind the curtains. React’s Runtime Environment As most developers know…

Inspecting the underlying communication traffic between React Native’s Javascript engine and iOS code can be pretty helpful when trying to debug what’s going on underneath the hood. The best way I’ve seen to inspect this traffic is to turn on DEBUG_SPY_MODE in MessageQueue.js var DEBUG_SPY_MODE = true; or in newer…