Moti Zilberman
0f4e5c382e
Summary: Pull Request resolved: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/pull/53436 Changelog: [Internal] Adds a `flavor` option to `unstable_spawnDebuggerShellWithArgs` to select between two modes: 1. `flavor: 'dev'` (current behaviour) - launching a stock Electron binary (from the `electron` package) and pointing it directly at the shell code from the `src/electron` directory. 2. `flavor: 'prebuilt'` (new in this diff) - launching the prebuilt React Native DevTools binary included in the package (built continuously at Meta and committed as a DotSlash file in automated diffs e.g. D79836825). Note that this binary includes Electron *and* a frozen version of the shell code from `src/electron`. Going forward, `'dev'` will only be used when developing the package (e.g. in D78351934 we will move `electron` to `devDependencies`). The published version of the package is only intended to work with `flavor: 'prebuilt'`. Reviewed By: huntie Differential Revision: D78351931 fbshipit-source-id: d0e66b54c142dc2910619ba3d6d149d88324c872
@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.