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Entry Point

Nitro is built ontop of JSI - while the primary target is React Native, Nitro even works on any other target that provides JSI.

React Native's Entry Point

In React Native apps, Nitro makes use of the autolinking functionality provided by RN CLI.

Nitro itself is a react-native library - either a Native Module (old arch) or a Turbo Module (new arch) - with a single native method: install(). This native method will be called from JS when importing react-native-nitro-modules, so it will always happen before trying to use the NitroModules JS object.

Manually registering Nitro

If you are not within a typical React Native environment (e.g. a brownfield app, an out-of-tree platform, or simply a pure JSI environment), you can also use Nitro Modules by just installing Nitro manually.

After creating your jsi::Runtime and an instance of Dispatcher, simply call margelo::nitro::install():

#include <jsi/jsi.h>
#include <NitroModules/InstallNitro.hpp>
#include <NitroModules/Dispatcher.hpp>

jsi::Runtime& runtime = ...
std::shared_ptr<Dispatcher> dispatcher = ...
margelo::nitro::install(runtime, dispatcher);

Your Dispatcher implementation must properly implement runAsync and runSync to schedule calls on a Thread that can safely access the jsi::Runtime.

tip

If your Runtime can be accessed from any Thread, you can also skip Thread-hops here and just call the functions directly in your Dispatcher.

No Dispatcher

Nitro can also be installed without a Dispatcher:

#include <jsi/jsi.h>
#include <NitroModules/InstallNitro.hpp>

jsi::Runtime& runtime = ...
margelo::nitro::install(runtime);

In this case, all synchronous methods and properties remain in-tact, but any asynchronous hybrid methods (Promise) or callbacks will throw an error that Nitro does not have a Dispatcher to get back to the JS Thread.