Moti Zilberman
ba24f5f903
Summary: Pull Request resolved: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/pull/53438 Changelog: [Internal] Makes `flavor: 'prebuilt'` the default mode of launching the RNDT standalone shell, and the *only* mode supported in the published version of the package. See D78351931 for more context. With this, we can demote `electron` from `dependencies` to `devDependencies`. This makes it possible to make `debugger-shell` a dependency of `dev-middleware` (and thus of all major frameworks) without significantly impacting `npm install` times. We'll add this dependency on `debugger-shell` in an upcoming diff (D78351937). We also stop publishing the `dist/electron` subdirectory (and `src/electron` for good measure) since the corresponding code will always be bundled into the prebuilt binary instead. Reviewed By: huntie Differential Revision: D78351934 fbshipit-source-id: 2a4b03e852c4d0330250567c41dca09d1c4f3abd
@react-native/debugger-shell
Experimental Electron-based shell for React Native DevTools. This package is not part of React Native's public API.
Why Electron?
The React Native DevTools frontend is based on Chrome DevTools, which is a web app, but is not particularly portable: it's designed to run in Chromium, and Chromium only. Prior to @react-native/debugger-shell, we would run it in hosted mode in an instance of Chrome or Edge.
Relying on hosted mode presents a variety of UX issues in the debugging workflow, such as the need to ask developers to install a particular browser before they can debug in React Native, and the inability to foreground/reuse existing debugger windows when relaunching the debugger for the same app. In order to address these issues effectively, we fundamentally need to leave the browser sandbox and run the debugger in a shell we can bundle with React Native, and whose behavior we can control.
Electron is a tried-and-tested framework for the specific task of embedding a Chromium browser in a portable, customized shell. As a rule we'll hold a high bar for performance and reliability, and we'll only add features to the shell if they are strictly necessary to complement the DevTools frontend's built-in capabilities.