Name: Improving your React Native code using Path Aliases
Rating: 1.5 (7930 reviews)
Author: luizrebelatto

When we develop an application with many folders the import paths are often too large and this affects the readability of your code as per the example below:

import Input from '../../../src/components/Input';
import HomeSvg from '../../../src/assets/home.svg';

To solve this problem we will have to make some settings:

1º Step: Libs Install

Install metro-react-native-babel-preset and babel-plugin-module-resolver as devDependencies

npm install metro-react-native-babel-preset --save-dev
yarn add metro-react-native-babel-preset -D

npm install babel-plugin-module-resolver --save-dev
yarn add babel-plugin-module-resolver -D

2º Step: Babel Configuration

alias: In will have the paths and the name that will be used when calling the specified path.
extensions: Extensions to the files that will be used

module.exports = function(api) {
  api.cache(true);
   return {
     presets: ['babel-preset-expo', 'module:metro-react-native-babel-preset'],
     plugins: [
       "module-resolver",
       {
         alias: {
           // This needs to be mirroned in tsconfig.json/jsconfig.json
          components: "./src/components",
          svg: "./src/assets",
         },
         extensions: ['.js', '.jsx', '.tsx'],
       },
     ],
   };
};

3º Step: tsconfig/jsconfig configuration

Access the tsconfig.json or jsconfig.json file
If neither of these files exist, create them in the project root
paths: Add the same paths added in babel.config.js, if the called folder does not have an index calling all files it is necessary to put "/*"
baseUrl: Tell the typescript where to start importing

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "baseUrl": ".",
    "paths": {
      // This needs to be mirrored in babel.config.js
      "components": ["./src/components"],
      "svg/*": ["src/assets/*"],
    }
  },
  "extends": "expo/tsconfig.base"
}

Final Result

import Input from 'components/Input';
import HomeSvg from 'svg/home.svg';