I recently worked on a RN project, after months of not touching it, and found out that there's a new thing called rnpm (https://github.com/rnpm/rnpm) that solves this issue.
RNPM is pretty good, but it doesn't work with some libraries that require slightly unique initialization steps or paths. I imagine this will eventually lead to some kind of postinstall hook in the module packages, which will be picked up by RNPM.
