Cache clearing in React Native: A handy cheat sheet

When developing complex and fast-moving mobile applications, teams are often under constant pressure to deliver features quickly. In these environments, certain technical details—while critical—can be overlooked. One such detail is effective cache management in React Native projects, which plays a significant role in development speed, build stability, and debugging efficiency.

While React Native provides a highly optimized development experience through smart caching mechanisms, these same mechanisms can sometimes slow teams down when cached artifacts behave unexpectedly. Understanding how to manage and clear cache effectively is essential—not just for developers, but also for teams aiming to maintain high-quality releases supported by reliable testing strategies.

This is where development best practices and intelligent test automation intersect. Tricentis Testim Mobile, with its AI-powered mobile test automation and support for both coded and codeless workflows, complements React Native development by helping teams validate app behavior consistently—even when underlying build or cache issues arise.

In this article, we’ll walk through how cache works in React Native and how to clear it across different development environments, emulators, and tools—so you can keep your development pipeline efficient and your testing efforts reliable.

Since this is not an introductory article, we expect you to have a project already set up. But if you don’t have any experience with the platform, we recommend you check out our other articles on the subject or find additional information in the React Native documentation.

Understanding Cache in React Native

React Native—and by extension iOS and Android—offers a versatile and developer-friendly ecosystem. One of the reasons React Native feels so smooth is its use of caching to speed up tasks that would otherwise require repeated compilation or long loading times.

Caching improves developer productivity by:

1. Reusing compiled bundles
2. Speeding up reload times
3. Reducing redundant processing

However, this strength can also become a weakness when cached data doesn’t update correctly or when stale artifacts persist across builds. Developers may find themselves facing bugs that seem impossible to reproduce or fix—often resorting to clearing cache as a last-ditch effort.

React Native relies on several caching layers, including:

1. Metro bundler (packager) cache
2. Emulator or simulator cache
3. npm or Yarn cache

Because these caches work together, a problem in one layer can affect the entire development workflow. Understanding how to clear each one properly helps restore stability and keeps development and testing aligned.

Handling React Native Cache

There are many methods to clear the cache in React Native. The question of which one to use depends on the particulars of your environment and tools. Let’s break it down.

If you have npm >= 6.0 and React Native >= 0.50, run the following commands:

$ watchman watch-del-all && rm -rf $TMPDIR/react-native-packager-cache-*
$ rm -rf $TMPDIR/metro-bundler-cache-* && rm -rf node_modules/ && npm cache clean –force
$ npm install && npm start — –reset-cache

If you’re using yarn instead of npm, you should use the following:

$ watchman watch-del-all &&
rm -rf $TMPDIR/react-native-packager-cache-* &&
rm -rf $TMPDIR/metro-bundler-cache-* &&
rm -rf node_modules/ &&
yarn cache clean &&
yarn install &&
yarn start -- --reset-cache

Now, this is a bit of a forceful method since it directly removes the directories where the cache lies. But there’s a more straightforward approach that achieves the same result. All you have to do is ruin the following commands:

$ react-native start --reset-cache

$ npm start -- --reset-cache

$ yarn cache clean

$ expo start -c

$ cd android && ./gradlew cleanBuildCache

$ npm install --save-dev react-native-clean-project

{
  "scripts": {
    "clean": "react-native clean-project",
    "clean:auto": "react-native clean-project-auto"
  }
}

$ npm run clean:auto

$ npm run clean:interactive