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Build and run the app

This guide describes how to build and run the app so you can develop it.

Main steps

(First, if using macOS: Upgrade to the latest version of the OS and then to the latest Xcode. In particular, Xcode versions before 9.0 are known to definitely not work.)

(If using Windows: Try installing WSL, and doing most of the following setup in the Linux environment. See our Windows guide.)

Before starting, install these dependencies if you don't have them:

Then, run the commands below in your terminal:

git clone https://github.com/zulip/zulip-mobile
cd zulip-mobile
yarn install

Unlike the Zulip Server project, we use the host machine directly for development, instead of provisioning a VM.

To install the React Native tools, and either Xcode or the Android SDK and Android Studio, follow the helpful instructions from React Native upstream on Getting Started. You want the tab "Building Projects with Native Code"; the "Quick Start" does not apply.

Continue those instructions until you can run the Zulip Mobile app with either react-native run-android or react-native run-ios. You'll want to be able to use both an emulator and a physical device; but for starting out, just get either one working so you can play with the app.

Android tips

  • To set up the Android emulator, follow the heading "Using a virtual device" in those React Native Getting Started instructions.
  • After you set up the Android emulator, you no longer need Android Studio. You can start the emulator from the command line.
  • When running on a physical device, if the device has Zulip installed from the Play Store, you may need to uninstall that version first.
  • Commands once you've set up:
    • react-native run-android - build, then run on an active emulator or USB-connected device. This won't start the emulator automatically.

iOS tips

More wrinkles are involved; see our separate doc on iOS tips.

Using a dev version of the server

This step is optional -- for most development you can use chat.zulip.org, or another live Zulip community you belong to. But sometimes when debugging interactions with the server, or developing server-side changes related to the mobile app, it's helpful to run the mobile app against a development server which you control.

Setting this up involves a few steps, but it should be straightforward if you follow the right instructions carefully. Take a look at our detailed instructions and try them out. If they don't work, please report it in chat, with details on exactly what you did and what happened; we'll help you debug, and then adjust the instructions so they work for the next person with a setup like yours.

Troubleshooting

Build failure: java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError

When trying to build the Android app, you may see this error:

A problem occurred evaluating project ':@remobile/react-native-toast'.
> java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: com/android/build/gradle/LibraryPlugin : Unsupported major.minor version 52.0

This can happen if you have a very old version of the JDK (Java Development Kit); React Native requires JDK 8, which was released in 2014.

To fix this, install JDK 8 or a newer version. You can check what version is installed by running the command java -version; with JDK 8, the version number starts with "1.8".

Build failure: Could not determine java version from '10.0.1'

When trying to build the Android app, if you're on an OS release from 2018 (including Ubuntu 18.04 "bionic" or Debian "buster"), you may see an error like the following:

* What went wrong:
Could not determine java version from '10.0.1'.

This is a sort of inverse of the issue above: we follow RN upstream in using an older version of Gradle, which doesn't support newer JDKs than Java 8. This issue happens when the default java on your system is a newer version.

To fix this,

  1. Make sure you have JDK 8 installed. On Ubuntu or Debian, you can do this with sudo apt install openjdk-8-jdk. In general, you can download it from Oracle.

  2. Set your JAVA_HOME to that JDK 8 installation. (This is used by gradlew to find the java command to run Gradle under.)

    • If you installed the Debian/Ubuntu package, then ls -l /usr/lib/jvm/ should list java-8-openjdk-amd64 or something similar to that.
    • export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64 (and put that in your ~/.bashrc or equivalent, so that you don't have to repeat it in the future.)
    • Now react-native run-android should work correctly.

(It's actually pretty reasonable to just stick to Java 8 everywhere. Java 9 only came out in late 2017 and was a short-term release with just 6 months of support; Java 10 is the same way. The next LTS version supported for several years will be Java 11, due in 2018-09.)

App shows a blank white screen

If you're developing on a Linux machine, and when you start the dev version of the app (either in an emulator or on a device) you just get a blank white screen, you may have hit your system's limit for inotify watches. You can increase this limit with the following commands:

echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf
sudo sysctl -p

Other issues

If you are having issues running the code on your machine, either for the first time or after updating an outdated code with the latest, please run:

yarn reinstall

Optionally, reset iOS simulator:

iOS Menu > Simulator > Reset Content and Settings…