README.md

React Native Brownfield Gradle Plugin

This plugin helps you convert your react-native brownfield implementation into a fat Aar.

Installation

From Remote

To your top level build.gradle add

buildscript {
    repositories {
        google()
        mavenCentral()
    }
    dependencies {
        classpath("com.android.tools.build:gradle")
        classpath("com.facebook.react:react-native-gradle-plugin")
        classpath("org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-gradle-plugin")
+       classpath("com.callstack.react:brownfield:0.4.0")
    }
}

To your brownfield project level build.gradle.kts add

 plugins {
     id("com.android.library")
     id("org.jetbrains.kotlin.android")
+    id("com.callstack.react.brownfield")
     `maven-publish`
     id("com.facebook.react")
 }
react {
     autolinkLibrariesWithApp()
 }
 
 val appProject = project(":app")

From Local

• From the root of this repository, run yarn brownfield:plugin:publish:local and it will publish the plugin to your local maven

To your top level build.gradle add

buildscript {
    repositories {
+       mavenLocal()
        google()
        mavenCentral()
    }
    dependencies {
        classpath("com.android.tools.build:gradle")
        classpath("com.facebook.react:react-native-gradle-plugin")
        classpath("org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-gradle-plugin")
+       classpath("com.callstack.react:brownfield:0.3.0")
    }
}

To your brownfield project level build.gradle.kts add

 plugins {
     id("com.android.library")
     id("org.jetbrains.kotlin.android")
+    id("com.callstack.react.brownfield")
     `maven-publish`
     id("com.facebook.react")
 }
react {
     autolinkLibrariesWithApp()
 }
 
 val appProject = project(":app")

API Usage

• About Dependencies

You can embed dependencies in your Aar by using this configuration. It is as simple as doing the following:

dependencies {
    embed("com.facebook.react:hermes-android:0.77.0")
    embed("com.google.android.material:material:0.7.0")
}

The embed configuration is useful, only if you want to bundle these dependencies within your fat Aar. Be careful that it can result in clashes between the bundled version of a dependency and the version used by the App. What this means is consider you embedded dependencyA with version 0.0.1 and the native App which will use your Aar also uses dependencyA but with version 0.0.2, it will produce a clash.

If you are sure that the native App will never use the dependency you have embedded within your Aar, you should be fine with using embed. But if you know before hand that those dependencies can be used by the native App then it's better for you to avoid embedding and instead use either of implementation and compileOnly configuration and surface it with the native team that the Aar relies on the App to provide these dependencies.

When you use implementation or compileOnly, this plugin does not bundle those dependencies in your Aar and instead just uses them to provide for the compile time. Using these configuration is as simple as:

dependencies {
    implementation("com.facebook.react:hermes-android:0.77.0")
    compileOnly("com.google.android.material:material:0.7.0")
}

There is one more configuration called api and it is often the one you should use. The reason is that this configuration tells gradle to provide for these dependencies in compile time while developing and also provide these when the generated Aar is consumed by the native App. For the latter, you will need to use it in combination with pom.xml as the latter will only work if you have dependencies marked with api listed in pom.xml.

    api("com.facebook.react:react-android:0.77.0")
    api("com.facebook.react:hermes-android:0.77.0")
    implementation("com.google.android.material:material:0.7.0")

In react-native brownfield, when we want to use react-android and hermes-android in the Aar, we can use api to allow us developing and also tell gradle to provide these dependencies and it's transitive ones as well, using pom.xml. If the native App uses one of the transitive dependency say javax.inject, gradle will automatically pick the highest version. This is often the ideal usage scenario where we don't want the native App team to worry about react-native's dependencies and transitive dependencies.

---

We can use exclude to not embed a nested dependency:

dependencies {
    embed("com.facebook.fbjni:fbjni:0.4.0") {
        exclude("com.facebook.soloader")
    }
}

---

• Expo Support

By default expo support is disabled. You can enable it by setting the following to true:

reactBrownfield {
    isExpo = true
}

This will take care of linking the expo dependencies like expo-image to your AAR.

---

Tooling

• We are using ktlint and detekt for formatting and linting
• You can run ./gradlew :brownfield:lint to auto-format and detect linting issues

Architecture

Below is a flow diagram of how the files are being used in this gradle plugin from an overview: