react-native-network-client

Configurable network clients for React Native. Uses Alamofire for iOS and OkHttp for Android.

About

React Native uses a single URLSessionConfiguration and a single OkHttpClient for all network requests. In order to introduce multi-server support in the Mattermost mobile app, we need to maintain isolated instances of URLSession and OkHttpClient, each configured individually for a specific server. This library allows you to do just that.

Installation

npm install @mattermost/react-native-network-client

You will also need to update your applications Podfile to use our fork of Starscream. See the example app's Podfile.

Usage

import GenericClient, {
  getOrCreateAPIClient,
  getOrCreateWebSocketClient,
} from "react-native-network-client";

// ...

const response = await GenericClient.get("https://community.mattermost.com");
const { client: apiClient, created } = await getOrCreateAPIClient(
  "https://community.mattermost.com"
);
const { client: wsClient, created } = await getOrCreateWebSocketClient(
  "wss://community.mattermost.com"
);

Self-signed server certificate

To allow usage of self-signed server certificates you can pass in sessionConfiguration.trustSelfSignedServerCertificate = true in the options when creating an APIClient. It is recommended not to do this in production code as not only will the certificate be trusted, but the hostname will not be verified against your APIClient baseUrl's hostname. This can open you up to man-in-the-middle attacks.

Errors

There are two cases where errors will be returned by the native code. The first is via rejected promises and the second is via events.

In the case of rejected promises, the error structure is unchanged from what React Native returns:

{
    code: number;
    message: string;
    userInfo: Object;
    domain?: string;
    nativeStackAndroid?: Object;
    nativeStackIOS?: Object;
}

API client events will have the following structure:

{
    serverUrl: string;
    errorCode: number;
    errorDescription: string;
}

and you'll need to subscribe to these events by passing your error handler as a callback to onClientError(callback: APIClientErrorEventHandler): void;.

WebSocket client events will have the following structure:

{
    url: string;
    errorCode: number;
    errorDescription: string;
}

and you'll need to subscribe to these events by passing your error handler as a callback to onClientError(callback: WebSocketClientErrorEventHandler): void;.

For both API client and WebSocket client, the following error codes apply:

• Keychain specific errors will be in the range -100 to -199

  Code	Reason
  -100	Retrieval of a client certificate from the Keychain failed due to SecIdentityCopyCertificate returning a nil certificate
  -101	Retrieval of a client certificate from the Keychain failed due to SecItemCopyMatching returning a nil SecIdentity
  -102	Storage of a bearer authentication token in the Keychain failed due an invalid token data
  -103	Importing of a PKCS#12 file failed due to an invalid file path
  -104	Importing of a PKCS#12 file failed due to invalid file contents
  -105	Importing of a PKCS#12 file failed due to identity already existing in Keychain
  -106	Retrieval/storage of a token failed due to an invalid server URL
  -107	Retrieval/storage of a client certificate failed due to an invalid host
  -108	Importing of a PKCS#12 file failed due to an incorrect or missing password

• APIClient specific errors will be in the range -200 to -299

  Code	Reason
  -200	SSL handshake failed due to a missing client certificate
  -299	Server SSL certificate is not trusted or invalid

Method Swizzling

There may be cases where network requests are made by another dependency of your app, for example, react-native-fast-image, and you'll want those requests to adopt the configuration of your react-native-network-client created client.

iOS:

While there might be a cleaner solution to this, we've opted for method swizzling in IOS for our own use case at Mattermost. You can find an example of how to do this in example/ios/SDWebImageDownloaderOperation+Swizzle.m. The specific swizzle code to write will depend on your dependency and on the dependency version as well since method implementations change.

Android:

For Android, we provide the interceptor android/src/main/java/com/mattermost/networkclient/interceptors/RCTClientRequestInterceptor.kt that adapts the request if an APIClient is found for the request. To make this interceptor active you need to do two things:

1. Add OkHttpClientProvider.setOkHttpClientFactory(new RCTOkHttpClientFactory()); to your MainApplication's onCreate function (see example/android/app/src/main/java/com/example/reactnativenetworkclient/MainApplication.java).
2. Ensure that all dependencies use the same version of okhttp3 by adding the following to the dependencies block of your application's android/app/build.gradle file (see example/android/app/build.gradle):

implementation "com.squareup.okhttp3:okhttp:4.9.2"
implementation "com.squareup.okhttp3:okhttp-urlconnection:4.9.2"

Enable Flipper on Android

--- a/android/app/src/debug/java/com/RNDiff/flipper/ReactNativeFlipper.java
+++ b/android/app/src/debug/java/com/RNDiff/flipper/ReactNativeFlipper.java
@@ -22,6 +22,8 @@ import com.facebook.react.ReactInstanceEventListener;
 import com.facebook.react.ReactInstanceManager;
 import com.facebook.react.bridge.ReactContext;
 import com.facebook.react.modules.network.NetworkingModule;
+import com.mattermost.networkclient.RCTOkHttpClientFactory;
+
 import okhttp3.OkHttpClient;
 
 /**
@@ -37,6 +39,8 @@ public class ReactNativeFlipper {
       client.addPlugin(new SharedPreferencesFlipperPlugin(context));
       client.addPlugin(CrashReporterPlugin.getInstance());
       NetworkFlipperPlugin networkFlipperPlugin = new NetworkFlipperPlugin();
+      RCTOkHttpClientFactory.Companion.setFlipperPlugin(networkFlipperPlugin);
+
       NetworkingModule.setCustomClientBuilder(
           new NetworkingModule.CustomClientBuilder() {
             @Override

Troubleshooting

If you hit the following iOS build error:

Undefined symbols for architecture x86_64:
  "nominal type descriptor for (extension in Foundation):__C.NSURLSessionWebSocketTask.Message", referenced from:

you'll need to remove the references to "$(TOOLCHAIN_DIR)/usr/lib/swift-5.0/$(PLATFORM_NAME)" in your project's project.pbxproj as described in react-native/issues/31179#issuecomment-829536845

Contributing

See the contributing guide to learn how to contribute to the repository and the development workflow.

License

MIT