react-native-chat AGENTS.md

AGENTS.md

Guidance for AI coding agents working inside this repository.

If you are instead helping someone use this library in their own app, read llms.txt - it is a compact integration guide and does not require the checkout.

What this is

@kesha-antonov/react-native-chat is a chat UI component library for React Native and Web - a maintained continuation of react-native-gifted-chat. It ships as compiled JavaScript plus type definitions; there is no native code in this package.

Setup

Requires Node >= 20 and Yarn 4 (pinned via packageManager; use yarn, never npm).

yarn install          # library
cd example && yarn install && cd ..   # example app - a SEPARATE yarn project

The repo is not a Yarn workspace. example/ has its own package.json, its own yarn.lock, and its own node_modules, and depends on the library via link:... Installing at the root does not install the example, and vice versa.

Commands

Run these from the repo root:

Command	What it does
yarn test	Jest suite. Must stay green.
yarn typecheck	tsc --noEmit over src/. Must stay clean.
yarn lint	ESLint over both src/ and example/. Must report 0 errors and 0 warnings.
yarn lint:fix	Auto-fix what ESLint can.
yarn build	rm -rf lib && tsc - emits lib/, which is gitignored and is what gets published.
yarn prepublishOnly	lint + test + build, i.e. the full gate.

Inside example/: yarn lint and yarn typecheck cover the example app on its own. Note that the root yarn lint also lints example/, under stricter rules than the example's own expo lint - so a change that passes cd example && yarn lint can still fail at the root. Always run the root yarn lint before you finish.

Layout

src/                     library source - the only thing published (as compiled lib/)
  Chat/                  the top-level <Chat> component
  MessagesContainer/     list engine (FlatList / FlashList), day header, scroll handling
  Bubble/ Message/       a single message row and its bubble
  Reactions/ Reply/      emoji reactions, swipe-to-reply
  components/            shared leaf components (Icon, TouchableOpacity, markdown, voice…)
  hooks/                 useTheme, useLabels, useStreamingMessages, …
  locales/ i18n.ts       built-in UI translations (en, es, fr, de, ru)
  Models.ts              IMessage, User, QuickReplies, MessageReaction - the public data model
  index.ts types.ts      public API surface; anything not exported here is internal
  __tests__/             Jest tests, colocated with the source they cover
tests/setup.ts           global Jest mocks (reanimated, worklets, safe-area, keyboard)
example/                 Expo demo app - separate yarn project, consumes the built lib/
docs/                    MIGRATION.md, STREAMING.md