Month: March 2017

Facebook’s watchman. Initially, I do not have any particular needs with this software. However, I got issues when I tried to run a sample mobile app, created in Expo XDE (https://expo.io/). By looking at the error logs shown on Expo XDE, I noticed that Expo XDE runs watchman, before it builds the project and this process was ended as failing.

Armed with this error logs, I decided to install watchman and the efforts were not simply as running a sudo apt-get install command in one go. watchmancan be installed through pulling its source code, build the source code and install it. It took me some time to figure out the details of dealing with these chores and be able to install it properly.

I created this article as a reference for my future’s needs and to anyone who shared same problem as mine when running Expo XDE or React Native development tool.

1. Install GNU M4: sudo apt-get install m4
2. Install automake & autotools-dev: sudo apt-get install autotools-dev automake
3. Install libssl-dev: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install libssl-dev
4. Ensure that checkinstall has been installed: sudo apt-get install checkinstall
5. Pull watchman’s repository and then move into watchman’s source code directory: git clone https://github.com/facebook/watchman.git && cd watchman
6. Run these commands to build the source code: ./autogen.sh && ./configure && make
7. Package the binaries as a debian package by running this command: sudo checkinstall . Follow the instructions on the screen until finished and confirm that the debian package is created ( the .deb file)
8. Install the .deb package using either GDebi Package installer or ubuntu’s default software installer.

By following these steps guide, the watchman should be installed in your ubuntu machine , if there were no errors displayed on any of these steps.