main.jsbundle does not exist. This must be a bug with + echo 'React Native

[hanishsharma]

Hello team,

I am getting this error while running my xcode project.

main.jsbundle does not exist. This must be a bug with + echo 'React Native.

Please help.

Thanks.

[IbraheemAlSaady]

This happens when there is no offline bundle file in your project, I had the same problem and this worked for me.

If you're running on the device, check the Running On Device docs

I added the below to my package.json file so I don't have to type it every time I want to generate an offline bundle

"build:ios": "react-native bundle --entry-file='index.ios.js' --bundle-output='./ios/YourAppName/main.jsbundle' --dev=false --platform='ios' --assets-dest='./ios'"

And you can run it like this npm run build:ios

You'll see the main.jsbundle file generated inside your ios/YourAppName directory

Next, open your project using XCode, right click on your project name then click Add Files to "YourProjectName", choose the main.jsbundle file that was generated, and then build again.

That should do it.

I'm using

"react": "16.0.0-alpha.12",
"react-native": "0.46.1",

[scottyantipa]

Not sure if this is the answer, but this issue went away for me when I moved my type declaration packages from devDependencies to dependencies in package.json.

The packages were @types/react, @types/react-native, @types/react-navigation.

[lolobosse]

@scottyantipa Can you elaborate on that? What packages? and what type declaration? That would help me a lot! 😄

[scottyantipa]

@lolobosse I updated my comment above

[lolobosse]

@scottyantipa I found my error, it was a weird \ in a string.

I had to debug the bundler and I saw the file crashing.

@reactnative Team: that would be great that if the --verbose option is activated, you deliver more logs than just SyntaxError on the bundler 😄

[cconstable]

For this issue was caused because the index.ios.js file was not located in the root directory of the repo. I had to modify the Build Phases -> Bundle React Native code and images script in Xcode to point it to the correct directory.

Original (what react native generated):

export NODE_BINARY=node
../node_modules/react-native/scripts/react-native-xcode.sh

Fixed:

export NODE_BINARY=node
../node_modules/react-native/scripts/react-native-xcode.sh ./src/index.ios.js

[xavieramoros]

I had a similar error after doing a pull of a repo upgraded to 0.48.4 (someone else did the RN upgrading).

Doing
rm -rf ./node_modules && npm install
showed this error, but doing:
rm -rf ./node_modules && yarn
actually fixed it. So I guess there are subtle differences on how yarn and git handle install scripts.

[johndanek]

@lolobosse What string was the / in? React Native code, or somewhere in XCode?

[jpapillon]

@johndanek The node_modules directory is always at the root of your project (React Native code).

[JamesDorrian]

Tried all of above, problem still persisting. Why was this closed @hanishsharma ?

[YasirSherzad]

Hi , I am using react-native 0.49, I get this error on device only , it works fine on Simulator. I tried many things but none worked.

[JamesDorrian]

@hanishsharma Why did you close this?

[MoOx]

I just got this, and that was just that the bundle wasn't building correctly.

I started dev mode and found an fatal error that were blocking compilation (a bad require). It was that simple.

[jordanmkoncz]

I had this issue as well when I tried to create an archive in Xcode.

For me, it was because the command to build the JS bundle was failing, and the reason it was failing was because one of my dependencies had a specific babel preset in its .babelrc file, which I did not have installed in my main React Native project's package.json.

In the Xcode error output, a few lines above the "main.jsbundle does not exist" line, I had the following error message from the react-native bundle command that had run:

TransformError: /Users/jordan/Development/MyAppName/node_modules/dotenv-parse-variables/lib/index.js: Unknown plugin "add-module-exports" specified in "/Users/jordan/Development/MyAppName/node_modules/dotenv-parse-variables/.babelrc" at 0, attempted to resolve relative to "/Users/jordan/Development/MyAppName/node_modules/dotenv-parse-variables"

So I installed the missing plugin by running: yarn add --dev babel-plugin-add-module-exports

I then went to Xcode again, did a Product -> Clean, then Product -> Archive, and this time it worked.

I actually used to have these dependency-related babel plugins installed, but I removed them because the release notes for 0.50.0 (https://github.com/facebook/react-native/releases/tag/v0.50.0) stated that this wouldn't be required anymore due to the change in enableBabelRCLookup. But I guess that change isn't quite working correctly, so for now we'll have to keep using the workaround I used here, or the postinstall workaround that they describe in those release notes.

For reference, here's my dependencies:

"react": "16.0.0",
"react-native": "0.50.3"