Which is the correct method of upgrading React Native in your app?

Question

In React Native, what is the difference between:

• react-native-git-upgrade
• react-native upgrade
• yarn upgrade react-native
• Just deleting node_modules, bumping the version number in package.json, removing yarn.lock or package-lock.json and doing an npm install or yarn install

What is the preferred method, advantages/disadvantages? Are some outdated? Only relevant for certain versions?

I want to love React Native, but when it comes to versions, it is absolute hell. 0.44.1 is the only version that has consistently worked for me without random fatal errors on startup.

Answer 1

As you can see in here in the official react-native document, the best way for upgrading react-native is using react-native-git-upgrade if you create your project with react-native init. If you started you app with create-react-native-app please read here.
Because React Native projects built with native code are essentially made up of an Android project, an iOS project, and a JavaScript project, upgrading can be rather tricky.
Advantage: The module react-native-git-upgrade provides a one-step operation to upgrade the source files with a minimum of conflicts. Under the hood, it consists in 2 phases:

• First, it computes a Git patch between both old and new template files,
• Then, the patch is applied on the user's sources.