Solving React Native’s “No bundle url present” Error

I hit the “No bundle url present.” roadblock today and had to dig a bit to find the solution. I’m going to describe how I encountered the problem, and provide the solution that’s worked more than once for me, ever since I found the suggestion in the React Native GitHub repository.

The Problem

You’ve got a React Native app.
In the terminal, you run react-native run-ios.

In the simulator, you hit a roadblock with the following error in a bright red screen:

No bundle url present. Make sure you’re running a packager server or have included a .jsbundle file in your application bundle.

The Solution

Buried in the comments of one of the React Native repo’s issues on GitHub, I found a solution that worked for me…

Open a terminal window
cd into YOUR_PROJECT/ios
Remove the build folder with rm -r build
Run react-native run-ios again

Alternatively, you could open Finder, navigate to YOUR_PROJECT/ios and delete the build folder. Then run react-native run-ios again.

I’m not sure what causes this (that bothers me), but but at least I’ve found something to get me going again.