A desktop debugging platform for mobile developers.

Flipper

Flipper (formerly Sonar) is a platform for debugging mobile apps on iOS and Android. Visualize, inspect, and control your apps from a simple desktop interface. Use Flipper as is or extend it using the plugin API.

Table of Contents

• Mobile development
• Extending Flipper
• Contributing to Flipper
• In this repo
• Getting started
  • Requirements
• Building from Source
  • Desktop
    • Running from source
    • Building standalone application
• iOS SDK + Sample App
• Android SDK + Sample app
• Documentation
• Contributing
• License

Mobile development

Flipper aims to be your number one companion for mobile app development on iOS and Android. Therefore, we provide a bunch of useful tools, including a log viewer, interactive layout inspector, and network inspector.

Extending Flipper

Flipper is built as a platform. In addition to using the tools already included, you can create your own plugins to visualize and debug data from your mobile apps. Flipper takes care of sending data back and forth, calling functions, and listening for events on the mobile app.

Contributing to Flipper

Both Flipper’s desktop app and native mobile SDKs are open-source and MIT licensed. This enables you to see and understand how we are building plugins, and of course, join the community and help improve Flipper. We are excited to see what you will build on this platform.

In this repo

This repository includes all parts of Flipper. This includes:

• Flipper’s desktop app built using Electron (/desktop)
• native Flipper SDKs for iOS (/iOS)
• native Flipper SDKs for Android (/android)
• Plugins:
  • Logs (/desktop/src/device-plugins/logs)
  • Layout inspector (/desktop/plugins/layout)
  • Network inspector (/desktop/plugins/network)
  • Shared Preferences/NSUserDefaults inspector (/desktop/plugins/shared_preferences)
• website and documentation (/website / /docs)

Getting started

Please refer to our Getting Started guide to set up Flipper.

Requirements

• node >= 8
• yarn >= 1.5
• iOS developer tools (for developing iOS plugins)
• Android SDK and adb

Building from Source

Desktop

Running from source

git clone https://github.com/facebook/flipper.git
cd flipper
yarn
yarn start

NOTE: If you’re on Windows, you need to use Yarn 1.5.1 until this issue is resolved.

Building standalone application

Provide either --mac, --win, --linux or any combination of them to yarn build to build a release zip file for the given platform(s). E.g.

yarn build --mac --version $buildNumber

You can find the resulting artifact in the dist/ folder.

iOS SDK + Sample App

cd iOS/Sample
rm -f Podfile.lock
pod install --repo-update
open Sample.xcworkspace
<Run app from xcode>

You can omit --repo-update to speed up the installation, but watch out as you may be building against outdated dependencies.

Android SDK + Sample app

Start up an android emulator and run the following in the project root:

./gradlew :sample:installDebug

React Native SDK + Sample app

cd react-native/ReactNativeFlipperExample
yarn
yarn android

Note that the first 2 steps need to be done only once.

Alternatively, the app can be started on iOS by running yarn ios.

Troubleshooting

Older yarn versions might show an error / hang with the message ‘Waiting for the other yarn instance to finish’. If that happens, run the command yarn first separately in the directory react-native/react-native-flipper.

Documentation

Find the full documentation for this project at fbflipper.com.

Our documentation is built with Docusaurus. You can build it locally by running this:

cd website
yarn
yarn start

Contributing

See the CONTRIBUTING file for how to help out.

License

Flipper is MIT licensed, as found in the LICENSE file.