usrbowe / flipper

A desktop debugging platform for mobile developers.

Flipper

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Important Announcement

Flipper is moving away from its Electron distribution to an in-Browser experience.

How does this affect me?

Functionality hasn't changed. The UI remains unchanged. Flipper will run in your default browser instead of a standalone application. If you build from source, Flipper will open in the browser instead of a standalone app. We also provide a MacOS app for the Flipper runtime which can be run and will also open Flipper in the browser.

The last Electron release is v0.239.0. As such, future releases will not include Electron artifacts.

React Native support

If you are debugging React Native applications, v0.239.0 will be the last release with support for it due to technical limitations for React Dev Tools and Hermes Debugger plugins. As such, please refer to that release when debugging React Native applications.

New, dedicated debug tooling for React Native is currently being developed at Meta. In the mean time we recommend this blog post with guidance on how to get the capibilities of Flipper through several alternatives.

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Flipper is a platform for debugging mobile apps on iOS and Android and JS apps in your browser or in Node.js. Visualize, inspect, and control your apps from a simple desktop interface. Use Flipper as is or extend it using the plugin API.

Table of Contents

• In this repo
• Getting started
  • Requirements
• Building from Source
  • Desktop
    • Running from source
    • Building standalone application
  • iOS SDK + Sample App
  • Android SDK + Sample app
  • React Native SDK + Sample app
  • JS SDK + Sample React app
    • Troubleshooting
• Documentation
  • Contributing
  • License

Mobile development

Flipper aims to be your number one companion for mobile app development on iOS and Android. Therefore, we provide a bunch of useful tools, including a log viewer, interactive layout inspector, and network inspector.

Extending Flipper

Flipper is built as a platform. In addition to using the tools already included, you can create your own plugins to visualize and debug data from your mobile apps. Flipper takes care of sending data back and forth, calling functions, and listening for events on the mobile app.

Contributing to Flipper

Both Flipper's desktop app, native mobile SDKs, JS SDKs are open-source and MIT licensed. This enables you to see and understand how we are building plugins, and of course, join the community and help to improve Flipper. We are excited to see what you will build on this platform.

In this repo

This repository includes all parts of Flipper. This includes:

• Flipper's desktop app built using Electron (/desktop)
• native Flipper SDKs for iOS (/iOS)
• native Flipper SDKs for Android (/android)
• cross-platform C++ SDK (/xplat)
• React Native Flipper SDK (/react-native)
• JS Flipper SDK (/js)
• Plugins (/desktop/plugins/public/)
• website and documentation (/website, /docs)

Getting started

Please refer to our Getting Started guide to set up Flipper. Or, run npx flipper-server for a browser based version of Flipper.

Requirements

• node >= 18
• yarn >= 1.16
• iOS developer tools (for developing iOS plugins)
• Android SDK and adb

Building from Source

Desktop

Running from source

git clone https://github.com/facebook/flipper.git
cd flipper/desktop
yarn
yarn start

Building standalone application

Provide either --mac, --win, --linux or any combination of them to yarn build to build a release zip file for the given platform(s). E.g.

yarn build --mac

You can find the resulting artifact in the dist/ folder.

iOS SDK + Sample App

cd iOS/Sample
rm -f Podfile.lock
pod install --repo-update
open Sample.xcworkspace
<Run app from xcode>

You can omit --repo-update to speed up the installation, but watch out as you may be building against outdated dependencies.

Android SDK + Sample app

Start up an android emulator and run the following in the project root:

./gradlew :sample:installDebug

React Native SDK + Sample app

Requires RN 0.69+!

cd react-native/ReactNativeFlipperExample
yarn
yarn android

Note that the first 2 steps need to be done only once.

Alternatively, the app can be started on iOS by running yarn ios.

If this is the first time running, you will also need to run pod install --repo-update from the react-native/ReactNativeFlipperExample/ios folder.

React Native Windows (Experimental)

An experimental version of Flipper for React Native Windows is available. The following steps prepare the React Native Flipper project:

cd react-native/react-native-flipper
vcpkg install openssl:x64-uwp openssl:arm-uwp
vcpkg integrate install
yarn install
cd windows
nuget install ReactNativeFlipper/packages.config

In a nutshell, vcpkg is used to install OpenSSL. Nuget is used to install Boost.

Then, the sample application can be built and run as follows:

cd ../../ReactNativeFlipperExample
yarn install
yarn relative-deps
npx react-native run-windows

At the moment there's no available package for React Native Flipper. This means that to integrate Flipper with any other existing applications, an explicit reference to the project needs to be added just as is done with the sample application.

JS SDK + Sample React app

cd js/react-flipper-example
yarn
yarn start

Troubleshooting

Older yarn versions might show an error / hang with the message 'Waiting for the other yarn instance to finish'. If that happens, run the command yarn first separately in the directory react-native/react-native-flipper.

Documentation

Find the full documentation for this project at fbflipper.com.

Our documentation is built with Docusaurus. You can build it locally by running this:

cd website
yarn
yarn start

Contributing

See the CONTRIBUTING file for how to help out.

License

Flipper is MIT licensed, as found in the LICENSE file.