Export better init function

[brody4hire]

Describe the Feature

Background

I would like to include and use @react-native-community/cli in tools such as create-react-native-module and react-native-module-init to generate an example project rather than relying on the user to install some version of the CLI. This was suggested in brody4hire/create-react-native-module#204.

One solution would be to use a utility such as execa to spawn and wait for the CLI to generate the example project. But I think it would be smoother to simply import and call a function in @react-native-community/cli to generate the example project.

@react-native-community/cli does export an init function but it seems to point into an internal initCompat module: https://github.com/react-native-community/cli/blob/v5.0.1-alpha.2/packages/cli/src/index.ts#L11

This exported function seems to assume that it should generate the project based on the React Native template in node_modules: https://github.com/react-native-community/cli/blob/v5.0.1-alpha.2/packages/cli/src/tools/generator/templates.ts#L25

When I tried using this exported function in create-react-native-module I was not happy with the result due to the lack of flexibility, as in this abandoned PR: brody4hire/create-react-native-module#420

Another disadvantage is that react-native would be needed as a peer dependency.

Requested feature

Export a better init function that allows a different React Native version such as [email protected] or the wonderful react-native-tvos fork. Here is the function that I would like to use: https://github.com/react-native-community/cli/blob/v5.0.1-alpha.2/packages/cli/src/commands/init/init.ts#L196-L220

Temporary workaround

I made https://github.com/brodybits/react-native-init-func with the following workaround in its index.js:

const init = require('@react-native-community/cli/build/commands/init').default
  .func

module.exports = init

Possible Implementations

Simply export a function such as https://github.com/react-native-community/cli/blob/v5.0.1-alpha.2/packages/cli/src/commands/init/init.ts#L196-L220

Related Issues

N/A

[github-actions]

There hasn't been any activity on this issue in the past 3 months, so it has been marked as stale and it will be closed automatically if no further activity occurs in the next 7 days.