Unable to open Expo menu after failing to connect to debugger

[jojenki]

I've never setup a debugger for my app when running on my Android device (tried and can't figure it out). That's acceptable for now, since I've just been using Android for look-and-feel. Today, I opened the Expo menu within my app and accidentally clicked "Debug Remote JS". Of course, this always fails because I don't have a debugger setup.

Now, whenever I open my app on my Android device it gives me the failure screen with the big red bar at the top saying "Failed to connect to debugger!". The only options I have are "DISMISS" and "RELOAD". If I RELOAD, it kills the app and restarts it, and takes me back to the "Failed to connect to debugger!" page. If I DISMISS, it closes the warning page and then just hangs on the app loading screen. It never actually loads the app.

The most frustrating part (and the real bug here) is that I can't bring up the context menu to tell it to stop trying to connect a debugger or tell Expo to forget my settings for this app. Expo effectively locks me out of the app because of the failure to connect to the debugger. The only "fix" I've found for this is to go into Android's Settings and Clear Cache and Clear Storage for the Expo app, which also logs me out. Instead, the Expo app should let me change the settings like connecting to the debugger before I actually launch the app.

[brentvatne]

Of course, this always fails because I don't have a debugger setup.

this shouldn't be the case - it should open up chrome to start the debugger.

The most frustrating part (and the real bug here) is that I can't bring up the context menu to tell it to stop trying to connect a debugger or tell Expo to forget my settings for this app.

yeah that's very annoying, sorry about that

[jojenki]

Thanks for the quick response. Where should it open the Chrome window, on the Android device where the app is being launched or on my desktop where I'm doing development? Maybe I need to already have a Chrome window open on my desktop? (My default browser is actually Firefox.) I'll take another pass through the setup. Thanks!

[chuanxie]

i would say sdk 40 is the worst upgrade of expo.
so many things stop working

[jojenki]

Well, if this is the worst upgrade, then the product is in a pretty great state. This is my first experience with it, and I am extremely pleased.

[brentvatne]

@chuanxie - that is strange, because we didn't update the react-native version and most of the changes were bug fixes and feature improvements. perhaps there are some other underlying issues in your app? if you want to share your app with me on github i can investigate. i strongly suspect it's not actually related to anything we did

[brentvatne]

Thanks for the quick response. Where should it open the Chrome window, on the Android device where the app is being launched or on my desktop where I'm doing development? Maybe I need to already have a Chrome window open on my desktop? (My default browser is actually Firefox.) I'll take another pass through the setup. Thanks!

it would open chrome on your computer (or i believe it will fall back to firefox if you use that by default, but i am not entirely sure).

[chuanxie]

@brentvatne. i created a branch for sdk40 upgrade and react native debugger stopped working (waiting for react to connect), deleted yarn lock and node_modules, checkout the sdk39 and ran yarn install. react native debugger starts working again.
i even tested with react native debugger with brand new expo init and same issue with react native debugger. https://github.com/chuanxie/sdk40
tested with RN debugger version : 0.11.6 & 0.11.17
but if i use default debugger , app can be loaded but come with
Unable to resolve module ./debugger-ui/debuggerWorker`

DevTools failed to load SourceMap: Could not load content for http://localhost:19000/debugger-ui/debuggerWorker.aca173c4.js.map: Fetch through target failed: Target not supported; Fallback: HTTP error: status code 500, net::ERR_HTTP_RESPONSE_CODE_FAILURE

[brentvatne]

we lean on react-native's built in debugging, and so any problems that occur there also occur in expo projects. sadly this is an upstream react-native issue: facebook/react-native#28844

we have already worked on a fix for one of the possible causes (related to caching), @satya164 released a fix for it here: react-native-community/cli#1307

he has also encountered a similar issue to what you mentioned above, and he said that it's just a warning and debugging continues to work. he is investigating it though.

[jojenki]

Ah, the upstream issue seems to be the same issue that I've always experienced (as a new user). I've never been able to get debugging working on a device, emulator, or web, and I suspect that's the root cause. I've subscribed to it, so this issue can either track that one or be closed in lieu of it, as far as I'm concerned. Thanks!

[chuanxie]

@brentvatne
RN debugger problem solved after running brew upgrade like python and also watchman
maybe need to notice those dependencies for the future expo updates

[github-actions]

This issue is stale because it has been open for 60 days with no activity. If there is no activity in the next 7 days, the issue will be closed.

[github-actions]

This issue was closed because it has been inactive for 7 days since being marked as stale. Please open a new issue if you believe you are encountering a related problem.

[AlanSl]

The most frustrating part (and the real bug here) is that I can't bring up the context menu to tell it to stop trying to connect a debugger or tell Expo to forget my settings for this app.

yeah that's very annoying, sorry about that

@brentvatne This seems to still happen, so I don't think this issue should be closed.

I just did exactly the same thing as the original question: I accidentally turned on remote debugging on an app where I don't expect remote debugging to work (in my case it uses turbomodules / reanimated); and now I'm stuck because Expo has remembered my "preference", there's no way to change it outside of the developer shake-menu of the app (that I can see), but the app instantly crashes with this error before I can access the developer menu to try to turn it off again.

Is there any workaround for this?

I tried tricking Expo into seeing it as a different app by changing the name and slug in app.json then clearing cache and restarting, but it still saw it as the same app and still applied the same unremovable instant-crash preference.

(Longer-term, it'd be nice if there was an option in Expo app settings, or if you could access the developer menu of an app before opening it by long-pressing it in the Expo list)

[anti-duhring]

I just did exactly the same thing as the original question: I accidentally turned on remote debugging on an app where I don't expect remote debugging to work (in my case it uses turbomodules / reanimated); and now I'm stuck because Expo has remembered my "preference", there's no way to change it outside of the developer shake-menu of the app (that I can see), but the app instantly crashes with this error before I can access the developer menu to try to turn it off again.

Got the same error here... The solution that I found was to uninstall the app in my device and then run the build again. The menu showed like was my first time running the app and I was able to turn local dev tools off once again.

[jpschw]

We couldn't access our application anymore in the Android simulator because of this bug. There is no way to bring up the menu after the error has occurred. Reinstalling Expo Go on the device resolves the issue.

[DmitriyOpletaev]

I also faced this, it's terrible. Can you fix it?

[audoh]

Issue still seems to be present, tried getting the debugger to work as an alternative to reinstalling the app but no luck.

Edit seems like the issue is a result of running the expo server in a Docker container, since it obviously can't open a Chrome tab. I can manually navigate to http://localhost:19000/debugger-ui/ and get the debugger working.

Still, it doesn't seem like debugger connection failure should break the whole app.

[admehta01]

Happening for me too, only workaround is to uninstall and re-install my development build.

[soulfresh]

Same issue here