-bash: react-native: command not found

Question

I have successfully installed brew, node 4.0+, watchman and flow, and I received the following when I do npm install -g react-native-cli:

/Users/home/.node/bin/react-native -> /Users/home/.node/lib/node_modules/react-native-cli/index.js [email protected] /Users/home/.node/lib/node_modules/react-native-cli            └── [email protected] ([email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]) 

So I assume react-native-cli has been successfully installed as well. However when I run react-native, it says:

-bash: react-native: command not found 

My node version is 4.2.1, watchman 3.9, brew 0.9.5 (git 7ed6) and npm 2.14.7

Answer 1

You have to make sure /usr/local/share/npm/bin is in your PATH to use binaries installed with npm.

Add the following to your ~/.bashrc:

export PATH="/usr/local/share/npm/bin:$PATH" 

And reload your shell session.

---

If you find you don’t have a /usr/local/share/npm/bin directory, your npm may install its packages in another location. In this case you have to use the right path in the line above.

One solution to find that path is to run:

npm list -g | head -n 1 

This gives you the path where npm install its packages. This is not the path you want but it’s close. For example on my Linux it gives /home/baptiste/.linuxbrew/lib; it suffices to replace lib with bin to get the correct path:

export PATH="/home/baptiste/.linuxbrew/bin:$PATH" 

You can use $HOME to get your own home directory:

export PATH="$HOME/.linuxbrew/bin:$PATH" 

Answer 2

I tried many ways to work out a solution to this on my mac(node -v: v8.1.3, npm -v: 5.0.3). And when I ran npm install -g react-native-cli, the output was this:

/Users/xxx/.npm-packages/bin/react-native -> /Users/xxx/.npm-packages/lib/node_modules/react-native-cli/index.js + [email protected] updated 1 package in 2.988s

As you can see react-native was install in /Users/xxx/.npm-packages/bin/, different from what others may say. So I pasted the line export PATH=/Users/xxx/.npm-packages/bin:$PATH to my ~/.profile and opened a new Terminal window to run react-native. It worked!