create-react-native-app: Stuck in "Starting packager"

I installed the project, got the latest version with React 16, but I’m trying to reuse some code from a project using React 15 so I downgraded all versions to what’s specified here. But now, it seems the process is stuck in “Starting packager…”.

Any reason why I’m having this issue? And how can I fix/debug it?

npm ls react-native-scripts: react-native-scripts@0.0.29
npm ls react-native: react-native@0.42.3
npm ls expo: expo@15.1.3
node -v: v7.10.0
npm -v: 4.6.1
yarn --version: 0.23.4
watchman version: “version”: “4.7.0”

Also specify:

Operating system: mac OS
Phone/emulator/simulator & version: npm start or npm run ios produces the same issue

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 7 years ago
Comments: 31 (6 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

For me, if I just press ‘q’ it displays the QR code, but it won’t display the QR code automatically. If I don’t press ‘q’, it will just say “running packager”. However, then it leads to issue 81.

+21

ballenwillis on Jan 8, 2018

@tleunen : You can try to find current running node processes and kill them. Also try to clear watchman watchman watch-del-all (do it multiple times), close all open terminals and react-native start --reset-cache. Had similar issue and solved by killing all node processes, clearing watchman and reseting cache.

+15

deepmehtait on May 11, 2017

This should resolve the “Starting packager” issue: https://forums.expo.io/t/packager-not-loading-on-linux/2034/3

vladimirovvk on Aug 8, 2017

Clean installation of Antergos with Gnome, npm 4.6.1, node 6.11.2. Clean project just generated with create-react-native-app 1.0.0. Already tried:

 sudo sysctl -w fs.inotify.max_user_instances=1024
 sudo sysctl -w fs.inotify.max_user_watches=12288

Didn’t fix the issue, still stuck.

marco-fp on Aug 26, 2017

Try to install yarn, then run ‘yarn start’ instead of ‘npm start’ or ‘react-native start’

bugkias on Nov 15, 2017

@tleunen : try to clean up your rm -rf node_modules folder and npm i see if that helps?

deepmehtait on May 11, 2017

By me the issue was that the start command in package.json had changed from:

"start": "node node_modules/react-native/local-cli/cli.js start",

    "start": "react-native-scripts start",
"eject": "react-native-scripts eject",
"android": "react-native-scripts android",
"ios": "react-native-scripts ios",
"test": "jest"

pashute on May 26, 2018

Well… its almost a year since this is posted. Even the “Getting Started” skeleton wont work… and i cant figure out why. This cant be right 😦

stopal on Apr 15, 2018

@tleunen - I see! the problem is that react-native-scripts isn’t guaranteed to be backwards compatible, and in this case it was not. It would have been better to have an error message to indicate that – I didn’t anticipate that anybody would want to create a new project and downgrade. If you install react-native-scripts@0.0.26 this will be fixed (tried it on your example project)

brentvatne on May 11, 2017