Upgrading React Native to version 0.59 and beyond: a step-by-step guide

Upgrading is one of those tedious tasks that you’ll inevitably face at some point when working on a React Native project. If you’ve ever gone through this process, you’ve probably realised that it still has a lot of potential for improvement.

The most popular complaint about React Native, according to the recent "What do you dislike about React Native?" thread on GitHub is indeed: upgrading. It received 569 thumbs-up from the community, the second being Debugging with 350.

There’s been a very popular article on Upgrading React Native about 2 years ago, when it was at version 0.45. Since React Native is now at 0.59 and a lot of things have happened in the meantime, I thought it might be a good moment to pick up the topic again and look at the current state of the upgrading process in detail.

Why bother updating?

There are a couple of reasons why you should update your React Native app on a regular basis. Some of the most compelling ones are:

you’ll get all the latest performance improvements
you’ll have increased robustness and stability
you can access new APIs and features
you keep up with the latest breaking changes

Having that in mind, let's look at the different approaches to upgrading your app and its React Native-related dependencies.

The different upgrade paths

The recommended way to upgrade React Native according to its documentation is the upgrade command which is included in the React Native CLI.

Since version 0.59 of React Native it’s based on the community pluginrn-diff-purge and basically runs a three-way merge based on the differences it finds between your current version of React Native and the one you’re upgrading to. If you’re on this version or above, use that and don’t bother reading the rest of this post.

Before version 0.59 though, this process was more or less broken. People either used the outdated react-native-git-upgrade or relied on a simple copy-and-replace mechanism provided by the CLI’s upgrade command.

hile the semi-automated copy-and-replace mechanism works well if you didn’t touch any of your project’s native code, you may run into issues if your project has reached a certain complexity, or if you simply haven’t updated in a while.

That said, rest assured that there are safer ways to upgrade your app. They might take a bit more manual work and careful code analysis, but usually won’t take you more than an hour or two, given that your update is not a major one with a lot of breaking changes and your version of React Native isn’t completely outdated.

I’ll cover them from simplest to hardest. You have to check which upgrade path applies to your particular situation:

Upgrading an app based on the Expo SDK (simple): If you’re lucky enough to have built an app whose features are entirely covered by the Expo SDK, then updating can be done without too much hassle.
Upgrading apps without custom native code: This upgrade path is for those people who’ve either ejected an existing Expo app or created their repository using react-native init and haven’t tweaked any of the native code so far. That means you’ve only touched the JavaScript files of the app and didn’t integrate any third-party plugins that contain native files (you didn’t use react-native link or manually link any extensions yet). Upgrading should be relatively straight-forward in this case.
Upgrading apps with custom native code (hard): If your app has already reached a certain point of complexity and code changes in the native realm (you have used react-native link or did some manual linking of third-party extensions), there are two scenarios:

you’re on version 0.59+ of React Native and can run the new upgrade command using react-native upgrade which is based on rn-diff-purge and should run an automatic three-way merge. If everything goes well, you’ll end up with no conflicts. If any of the diffs result in a conflict, you’ll have to resolve them manually and commit the changes.
you’re on version 0.58 or before of React Native which means the react-native upgrade command is not reliable and you should do the update manually and in incremental steps as described below.

You should use this approach for any upgrade that targets version 0.58 or before. From version 0.59 forward, the automatic upgrade is based on rn-diff-purge (see upgrade path three below) which will make the process easier in the future.

Here are the steps that I usually follow to upgrade a React Native repository without any changes to the native code:

Check your package.json
Update the React Native dependency to your new target, e.g. "react-native": "0.58.0"
Update all your third-party library dependencies as well. If any of these contain linked native code (ie. react-native-maps) you’ll need to use upgrade path three as your repository will contain native code changes
Run npm install and take note of the React dependency, e.g. react: "react": "16.6.3"
Update the React dependency to the new target as well, e.g. "react": "16.6.3"
Run npm install again.
Now run react-native upgrade and it'll walk you through the process of overwriting all the required file changes one by one. Apart from a few meta files, this should only affect the ios and android folders
Make sure to run the post-upgrade steps mentioned above to prevent any errors resulting from outdated caches

This is the moment of truth: run react-native run-ios and react-native run-android to see if everything still works as expected.

If not, it’s not the end of the world. I’ve been there so many times and always found a way out thanks to the incredible support provided by the React Native community and the numerous GitHub and StackOverflow threads where people discuss and solve the most common issues.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s dig into the actual upgrade process. Remember that depending on the state and type of app you’re running, there are three different paths, so make sure to read the heading and see which of the them applies to your specific use case.

Feel free to grab a cup of coffee before moving on… ☕️ Oh, and better schedule this task for a Monday morning instead of a Friday afternoon. 😜

1. Upgrading an app based on the Expo SDK

If you’re lucky enough to have built an app whose features are entirely covered by the Expo SDK, then updating can be done without too much hassle.

Expo provides a detailed walk-through for each update they’re releasing on their blog. You can find the one that corresponds to your version by googling for the one you’re targeting, e.g. “Expo update 32”, which will show this post as the first result, or browse the Exposition blog directly.

I know this sounds kind of obvious, but I’ve spent about 15mins on this the first time I was looking for instructions on how to update Expo. 😊

Minor note for people who’ve used create-react-native-app

One thing that people tend to miss after updating Expo: if you’ve used create-react-native-app to setup your repository, then all the scripts in package.json need to be changed from react-native-scripts to expo, e.g. react-native-scripts ios becomes expo start — ios. Expo CLI should issue a warning on this, but it’s still easy to miss.

2. Upgrading apps without custom native code

This upgrade path is for those people who’ve either ejected an existing Expo app or created their repository using react-native init and haven’t tweaked any of the native code so far. That means you’ve only touched the JavaScript files of the app and didn’t integrate any third-party plugins that contain native files (you didn’t use react-native link or manually link any extensions yet). Upgrading should be relatively straight-forward in this case.

You should use this approach for any upgrade that targets version 0.58 or before. From version 0.59 forward, the automatic upgrade is based on rn-diff-purge (see upgrade path three below) which will make the process easier in the future.

Here are the steps that I usually follow to upgrade a React Native repository without any changes to the native code:

Check your package.json
Update the React Native dependency to your new target, e.g.
"react-native": "0.58.0"
Update all your third-party library dependencies as well. If any of these contain linked native code (ie. react-native-maps) you’ll need to use upgrade path three as your repository will contain native code changes
Run npm install and take note of the React dependency, e.g. react-native@0.58.0 requires a peer of **react@16.6.3** but none is installed.
Update the React dependency to the new target as well, e.g. "react": "16.6.3"
Run npm install again.
Now run react-native upgrade and it’ll walk you through the process of overwriting all the required file changes one by one. Apart from a few meta files, this should only affect the ios and android folders
Make sure to run the post-upgrade steps mentioned above to prevent any errors resulting from outdated caches

This is the moment of truth: run react-native run-ios and react-native run-android to see if everything still works as expected.

I see a “Could not find iPhone XXX simulator” error

This is related to people running xCode 11 and later, which doesn’t seem to be compatible with previous versions of React Native CLI. Here’s a temporary fix: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54504076/react-native-run-ios-returns-error-could-not-find-iphone-x-simulator

3. Upgrading apps with custom native code

If your app has already reached a certain point of complexity and code changes in the native realm (you have used react-native link or did some manual linking of third-party extensions), there are two scenarios:

you’re on version 0.59+ of React Native and can run the new upgrade command using react-native upgrade which is based on rn-diff-purge and should run an automatic three-way merge. If everything goes well, you’ll end up with no conflicts. If any of the diffs result in a conflict, you’ll have to resolve them manually and commit the changes.
you’re on version 0.58 or before of React Native which means the react-native upgrade command is not reliable and you should do the update manually and in incremental steps as described below.

There’s also the possibility to install the new upgrade command in versions lower than 0.59 as described here: “If you’d like to upgrade using this method from React Native version lower than 0.59.0, you may use a standalone version of this CLI: _npx @react-native-community/cli upgrade_.”

Let’s continue for those of you who are on version 0.58 or lower and want to upgrade to React Native 0.59 or higher. This is by far the most risky and fragile update path, so a lot of care needs to be taken while going through the different steps.

Updating this way requires you to bump your React Native version from the version you’re currently on to the target version one by one, using the table from the rn-diff-purge repository. Like this, you don’t risk breaking any of the native code and can analyse/debug the changes carefully and won’t end up with a big pile of diff commits that you throw at your application.

But let’s tackle them one by one:

FYI: steps 1–6 are exactly the same as in upgrade path two

Check your package.json
Update the React Native dependency to your new target, e.g.
"react-native": "0.58.0"
Update all your third-party library dependencies as well. If any of these contain linked native code (ie. react-native-maps) and you’re using CocoaPods, you might have to upgrade your Podfile as well. Refer to the dependency’s changelog and install instructions for more detail. In any case, we’re going to reinstall all pods as well after we’re done
Run npm install and take note of the React dependency, e.g. react-native@0.58.0 requires a peer of **react@16.6.3** but none is installed.
Update the React dependency to the new target as well, e.g. "react": "16.6.3"
Run npm install again
Using this table, check the differences in code between your origin and target version and check if it’s feasible to apply them all at once. If not, consider upgrading in smaller, incremental steps, e.g. from version 0.56 to 0.57 before doing a major leap from 0.56 to 0.57.8.
Run cd ios && pod repo update && pod install to reinstall any existing CocoaPods dependencies.

Run react-native run-ios and react-native run-android to see if everything is working fine.

That’s it, almost. Usually, the hard part of upgrading React Native starts after you’ve upgraded your files and is about ironing out all the issues that you run into.

In the unlikely case that everything went perfectly smooth, congratulate yourself and test your app thoroughly before opening that bottle of champagne. 😉

It’s more likely though that there’ll be some glitches you need to take care. We’ll cover some of these in the following, last section of this blog post.

Common pitfalls

While it’s impossible to cover all the issues you might run into, I thought it might be useful to cover the most common ones that I’ve seen.

Upgrading to React Native 0.56

With this upgrade, you’ll probably run into issues related to the Babel 7 update. Check out this part of the changelog for instructions on how to upgrade your JavaScript configuration.

Basically, you have to make sure that you have installed the new Babel preset:

npm install -D metro-react-native-babel-preset

… and babel.config.js is configured accordingly to make use of it:

module.exports = {
  presets: ['module:metro-react-native-babel-preset'],
}

Since this version introduces the new project-wide babel.config.js file, you can also consider deleting .babelrc. More on this in the Babel docs.

Upgrading to React Native 0.57

When you upgrade to this version you need to upgrade react and react-test-renderer to version “16.6.3”, as stated in the release notes.

If you run into any xCode 10-related issues, check out this part of the changelog for instructions on how to fix them. Version 0.58 includes those fixes as well, so you might consider upgrading to that directly.

The following GitHub repo may help as well as it documents the most common errors when upgrading to 0.57.

tylergaw/RNUpgradePath

Upgrading to React Native 0.58

Before upgrading to this version, check out the breaking changes.

As stated in the release notes, there are two important changes on each platform:

for iOS: you’ll need to manually link JavaScriptCore.framework when upgrading; this can be done via Xcode, and following the steps shown here.
for Android: it is possible that you’ll face an AAPT error regarding missing resources. In this case, you should try to update the build tools versions to buildToolsVersion = “28.0.2” in your android/build.gradle file.

Upgrading to React Native 0.59

This releases includes an upgrade of the CLI’s upgrade command, which will hopefully make this blog post obsolete soon. 😄

If you get any runtime crashes on Android, check out the release notes section on breaking changes, or look at the full release notes.

Upgrading to React Native 0.60

This is the latest version and should be used with care, as it’s still just a release candidate. A changelog isn’t available yet, but you can follow this thread to get updates on the state of this version.

Help me improve this article

If you think I missed anything essential or run into an issue that I haven’t documented and you think should be included in this article, please let me know.

Thanks for reading and I appreciate your comments.

Originally published on Medium on June 11, 2019.