How to Unlink a Library in React Native

1. Unlink a Library in React Native
2. Unlink a Library with Native Content
3. Unlink a Manually Installed React Native Library

React Native is a framework used for building mobile applications in JavaScript. The library has many ingrained native components and APIs you can use right out of the box.

However, these built-in features are not always sufficient.

Sometimes React developers need to write custom native components of their own. It’s even better if they can reuse native components in libraries that are available online.

React Native online community numbers thousands of developers. They have developed numerous libraries to enrich basic React Native features.

To use external React Native libraries, developers need to link them to their projects. Linking a library is very simple, but unlinking it can be a bit more difficult.

This article will try to demonstrate how to unlink libraries in React Native.

Unlink a Library in React Native

Choosing the right way to unlink a library in React native depends on how you installed it. If you installed it using JavaScript, you could run the following command in the prompt.

npm uninstall --save package_name

If it was installed as a developer package, then you must run:

npm uninstall --save-dev package_name

Unlink a Library with Native Content

If the library contains native content and requires linking with React Native project, you might have used React Native Package Manager (also known as rnpm) to link it.

If you did, you need to run the following command to remove the link.

rnpm unlink package_name

Once you perform this step, you need to uninstall the package using the npm command, as described in the first step.

Unlink a Manually Installed React Native Library

In this case, you must reverse all your actions to manually install the React Native library. Then run the following npm command.

npm uninstall --save package_name