// the find
callstack/haul
Haul is a command line tool for developing React Native apps, powered by Webpack
Haul was Callstack's drop-in replacement for the React Native packager, letting you bundle and serve RN apps with webpack instead of Metro. It's aimed at people who wanted full access to webpack's loader/plugin ecosystem and monorepo setups where Metro's symlink and watchman requirements caused pain. The project is effectively dead — the README's first line points you to Re.pack as the successor.
Full access to webpack.config.js meant you could use any existing webpack loader or plugin rather than working around Metro's closed transform pipeline. It solved concrete Metro pain points: no watchman dependency and working symlinks, which mattered a lot in monorepo/multi-package RN projects. The package is split sensibly (core, babel preset, RAM bundle plugin, bundle explorer) so you only pull in what your setup needs.
It never shipped Hot Module Replacement, a baseline feature for any RN dev workflow, and the README lists it as explicitly unlikely to ever land. Last push was March 2022 and the maintainers openly tell new users to migrate to Re.pack instead — this is unmaintained, not just quiet. It also lacks Delta Bundle support and doesn't implement the full set of react-native CLI commands, so you lose parity with the standard toolchain, and it pins to Node 10, which is itself long dead.