The CometChat React Native UI Kit is developed to keep developers in mind and aims to reduce development efforts significantly.

The UI Kit’s customizable UI components simplify the process of integrating text chat and voice/video calling features to your website or mobile application in a few minutes.

Installation Steps

Prerequisites

Before you begin, ensure you have met the following requirements:

1. A text editor. (e.g. Visual Studio Code, Notepad++, Sublime Text, Atom, or VIM)

2. Node

3. npm

4. React-Native

Installing CometChat React Native Chat UI Kit

Setup 🛠

To install React-Native UI Kit, you need to first register on CometChat Dashboard. Click here to sign up

i. Get your Application Keys 🔑
Create a new app
Head over to the Quick Start or API & Auth Keys section and note the App ID, Auth Key, and Region.

ii. Add the CometChat Dependency

npm install @cometchat-pro/[email protected] --save

iii. Other required dependencies
These packages help make the ui-kit smooth and functioning

react-native-sound
react-native-vector-icons
react-native-elements
react-native-fast-image
react-native-image-picker
react-native-document-picker
react-native-gesture-handler
react-native-reanimated
reanimated-bottom-sheet
react-native-video
react-native-video-controls
@react-navigation/bottom-tabs
@react-navigation/native
@react-navigation/stack
@react-native-picker/picker
@react-native-community/async-storage
@cometchat-pro/react-native-calls

Configure CometChat inside your app

i. Initialize CometChat 🌟
The init() method initializes the settings required for CometChat. We suggest calling the init() method on app startup, preferably in the created() method of the Application class.

import {CometChat} from '@cometchat-pro/react-native-chat';

const appID = 'APP_ID';
const region = 'REGION';
const appSetting = new CometChat.AppSettingsBuilder()
  .subscribePresenceForAllUsers()
  .setRegion(region)
  .build();
CometChat.init(appID, appSetting).then(
  () => {
    console.log('Initialization completed successfully');
    // You can now call login function.
  },
  (error) => {
    console.log('Initialization failed with error:', error);
    // Check the reason for error and take appropriate action.
  },
);

🚧

Note

Replace APP_ID and REGION with your CometChat App ID and Region in the above code

ii. Login your user 👤
This method takes UID and Auth Key as input parameters and returns the User object containing all the information of the logged-in user.

import {CometChat} from '@cometchat-pro/react-native-chat';

const authKey = 'AUTH_KEY';
const uid = 'SUPERHERO1';

CometChat.login(uid, authKey).then(
  (user) => {
    console.log('Login Successful:', { user });
  },
  (error) => {
    console.log('Login failed with exception:', { error });
  },
);

📘

Note

Replace AUTH_KEY with your CometChat Auth Key in the above code.

We have set up 5 users for testing having UIDs: SUPERHERO1, SUPERHERO2, SUPERHERO3, SUPERHERO4, and SUPERHERO5.

Add UI Kit to your project

• Clone this repository.

https://github.com/cometchat-team/cometchat-pro-react-native-chat-ui-kit.git

• Copy the 'react-native-chat-ui-kit' folder to your source folder.
• Copy all the peer dependencies from package.json into your project's package.json and install them using npm install

Launch CometChat

CometChatUI is an option to launch a fully functional chat application using the UI Kit. In CometChatUI all the UI Components are interlinked and work together to launch a fully functional chat on your website/application.

import {CometChatUI} from './react-native-chat-ui-kit';

function StackNavigator(props) {
  const Stack = createStackNavigator();

  return (
    <NavigationContainer>
      <Stack.Navigator
        headerMode="none"
        initialRouteName={props.isLoggedIn ? 'HomePage' : null}>
        <Stack.Screen name="LoginPage" component={LoginPage} />
        <Stack.Screen name="HomePage" component={HomePage} />
        <Stack.Screen
          name="CometChatUI"
          component={CometChatUI}
        />
      </Stack.Navigator>
    </NavigationContainer>
  );
}

Checkout our sample app

Visit our React Native App repo to run the React Native sample app.