react-native-asset

Link and unlink assets to your react-native project with ease!

Advantages

• react-native link only supports font files, this tool supports all assets.
• Unlinking is automatic when you delete an asset, with react-native link, you need to unlink the files manually.
• Proper link (and unlink) for mp3 (to use with react-native-sound) and ttf files.

Usage

• Install

  npm install -g @callstack/react-native-asset
  # or yarn
  yarn global add @callstack/react-native-asset
  

• Add assets to your react-native.config.js as you would with react-native link

  ...
   assets: [
      "./src/font",
      "./src/mp3",
    ];
  

• Add platform-specific assets to your react-native.config.js like so:

  ...
  assets: [
    "./src/mp3",
  ],
  iosAssets: [
    "./src/font/ios",
  ],
  androidAssets: [
    "./src/font/android",
  ],
  

• Run the command and linking + unlinking is automatic!

  react-native-asset
  

Explanation

With react-native link you have to unlink the files manually, which is hard work.
Instead this library writes link-assets-manifest.json to the root of android and ios folders to keep track of the files which it added, for later removing it for you if missing from your assets!

Parameters

• -p, --path - path to project, defaults to cwd.
• -a, --assets - assets paths, for example react-native-asset -a ./src/font ./src/mp3.
• -ios-a, --ios-assets - ios assets paths, will disable android linking.
• -android-a, --android-assets - android assets paths, will disable ios linking.
• -n-u, --no-unlink - won't unlink assets which no longer exists, not recommended.

Font assets linking and usage

Android

Font assets are linked in Android by using XML resources. For instance, if you add the Lato font to your project, it will generate a lato.xml file in android/app/src/main/res/font/ folder with all the font variants that you added. It will also add a method call in MainApplication.kt or MainApplication.java file in order to register the custom font during the app initialization. It will look something like this:

// other imports

import com.facebook.react.common.assets.ReactFontManager // <- imports ReactFontManager.

class MainApplication : Application(), ReactApplication {

  // other methods

  override fun onCreate() {
    super.onCreate()
    ReactFontManager.getInstance().addCustomFont(this, "Lato", R.font.lato) // <- registers the custom font.
    // ...
  }
}

In this case, Lato is what you have to set in the fontFamily style of your Text component. To select the font variant e.g. weight and style, use fontWeight and fontStyle styles respectively.

<Text style={{ fontFamily: 'Lato', fontWeight: '700', fontStyle: 'italic' }}>Lato Bold Italic</Text>

iOS

Font assets are linked in iOS by editing project.pbxproj and Info.plist files. To use the font in your app, you can a combination of fontFamily, fontWeight and fontStyle styles in the same way you would use for Android. In case you didn't link your font assets in Android and you are not sure which value you have to set in fontFamily style, you can use Font Book app in your Mac to find out the correct value by looking the Family Name property.

Migrating from 2.x

If you have already linked font assets in your Android project, when running this tool it will relink your fonts to use XML resources for them. This migration will allow you to use your fonts in the code the same way you would use it for iOS. Please update your code to use fontFamily, fontWeight and fontStyle styles correctly.

Backward compatability

• to use react-native 0.59 and below, use version 1.1.4