Setting up the Development Environment

This document guides you through setting up your development environment to start contributing to our codebase.

Prerequisites

Please complete our Introductory environment setup guide before proceeding. This ensures you have the necessary tools and dependencies installed in order to run Detox tests, which is a fundamental step before being able to contribute to the project itself.

Node.js

We recommend using nvm or nvm-windows to manage your Node.js versions. However, you can find our required Node.js version in the .nvmrc file and install it using your preferred method or from the official download page.

Currently, we require lts/iron (Node.js 20.x) for our development environment.

tip

The exhaustive list of LTS codenames (e.g. lts/iron) can be found at CODENAMES.md in the Node.js repository.

Setting Up The Monorepo

Our repository is a monorepo managed with Yarn workspaces. Read more about our repository structure.

To set up the monorepo locally, follow these steps:

1. Enable Corepack

Corepack is Node.js's built-in package manager manager. Enable it to use the correct Yarn version:

corepack enable

2. Clone the Repository

git clone git@github.com:wix/Detox.git
cd Detox
git submodule update --init --recursive

3. Install Dependencies

yarn install

For Wix Internal Contributors

Set the internal registry before installing:

export YARN_NPM_REGISTRY_SERVER="<company's private npm registry>"
yarn install

You can add this export to your shell profile (~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc) to make it permanent.

Installing Common Dependencies

React-Native CLI

react-native-cli is a command line interface for React Native.

npm install react-native-cli --global

Watchman

Watchman is a tool by Facebook for watching changes in the filesystem.

brew install watchman

xcpretty

xcpretty is a fast and flexible formatter for xcodebuild.

gem install xcpretty

Switching React Native Versions

To test against different React Native versions:

REACT_NATIVE_VERSION=0.77.0 ./scripts/change_all_react_native_versions.sh

This updates the relevant package.json files and regenerates the lock file.

Common Commands

Command	Description
yarn install	Install all dependencies
yarn workspaces foreach -A run build	Build all packages
yarn workspace detox test	Run detox tests
yarn workspace detox lint	Run linting