expo github action

Publish, build or manage your Expo app with Github Actions!

Usage   —   Examples   —   Caveats   —   Changelog

With this Expo action, you have full access to Expo CLI and EAS CLI itself. It allows you to fully automate the expo publish or expo build process, leaving you with more time available for your project. There are some additional features included to make the usage of this action as simple as possible, like caching and authentication.

This action is customizable through variables; they are defined in the action.yml. Here is a summary of all the variables that you can use and their purpose.

Never hardcode expo-token or expo-password in your workflow, use secrets to store them.

Using latest for eas-version is recommened, you should always have the latest version of this CLI installed.

Before you dive into the workflow examples, you should know the basics of GitHub Actions. You can read more about this in the GitHub Actions documentation.

1. Publish on any push to main
2. Cache Expo CLI for other jobs
3. Creating a new EAS build
4. Test PRs and publish a review version
5. Test PRs on multiple nodes and systems
6. Test and build web every day at 08:00
7. Authenticate using credentials

Below you can see the example configuration to publish whenever the main branch is updated. The workflow listens to the push event and sets up Node 14 using the Setup Node Action. It also auto-authenticates when the token is provided.

name: Expo Publish
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
jobs:
  publish:
    name: Install and publish
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: 14.x
      - uses: expo/expo-github-action@v6
        with:
          expo-version: 4.x
          token: ${{ secrets.EXPO_TOKEN }}
      - run: yarn install
      - run: expo publish

Below you can see a slightly modified version of the example above. In this one, we enabled the built-in cache that will reuse a previously installed Expo CLI. It skips the installation part and extracts the files directly, boosting the performance of your workflow.

You can read more about the cache here

name: Expo Publish
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
jobs:
  publish:
    name: Install and publish
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: 14.x
      - uses: expo/expo-github-action@v6
        with:
          expo-version: 4.x
          expo-cache: true
          token: ${{ secrets.EXPO_TOKEN }}
      - run: yarn install
      - run: expo publish

You can also install EAS CLI with this Github Action. Below we've swapped expo-version with eas-version, but you can also use them together. Both the token and username/password is shared between both Expo and EAS CLI.

We recommend using latest for eas-version to always have the most up-to-date version.

name: EAS build
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
jobs:
  build:
    name: Create new build
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: 14.x
      - uses: expo/expo-github-action@v6
        with:
          eas-version: latest
          token: ${{ secrets.EXPO_TOKEN }}
      - run: yarn install
      - run: eas build

Reviewing pull requests can take some time if you have to read every line of code. To make this easier, you can publish the edited version of the PR using a release channel. Below you can see an example of a workflow that publishes and comments on te PR when the app is published.

name: Expo Review
on: [pull_request]
jobs:
  publish:
    name: Install and publish
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: 14.x
      - uses: expo/expo-github-action@v6
        with:
          expo-version: 4.x
          token: ${{ secrets.EXPO_TOKEN }}
      - run: yarn install
      - run: expo publish --release-channel=pr-${{ github.event.number }}
      - uses: unsplash/comment-on-pr@master
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        with:
          msg: App is ready for review, you can [see it here](https://expo.dev/@bycedric/use-expo?release-channel=pr-${{ github.event.number }}).

With GitHub Actions, it's reasonably easy to set up a matrix build and test the app on multiple environments. These matrixes can help to make sure your app runs smoothly on a broad set of different development machines.

If you don't need automatic authentication, you can omit the token variables.

name: Expo CI
on: [pull_request]
jobs:
  ci:
    name: Continuous Integration
    runs-on: ${{ matrix.os }}
    strategy:
      matrix:
        os: [ubuntu-latest, macOS-latest, windows-latest]
        node: [10, 12, 13]
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: ${{ matrix.node }}
      - uses: expo/expo-github-action@v6
        with:
          expo-version: 4.x
      - run: yarn install
      - run: yarn test
      - run: expo doctor

You can also schedule jobs by using the cron syntax. It can help to minimize the number of updates your users have to install.

name: Expo Daily CI
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: 0 8 * * *
jobs:
  ci:
    name: Daily Continuous Integration
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: 14.x
      - uses: expo/expo-github-action@v6
        with:
          expo-version: 4.x
      - run: yarn install
      - run: yarn test
      - run: expo build:web

Instead of using an access token, you can also authenticate using credentials. This is only possible when Expo CLI is installed.

name: Expo Publish
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
jobs:
  publish:
    name: Install and publish
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: 14.x
      - uses: expo/expo-github-action@v6
        with:
          expo-version: 4.x
          username: ${{ secrets.EXPO_CLI_USERNAME }}
          password: ${{ secrets.EXPO_CLI_PASSWORD }}
      - run: yarn install
      - run: expo publish

You need to authenticate for some Expo commands like expo publish and expo build. This action gives you configuration options to keep your workflow simple. You can choose if you want to authenticate using an EXPO_TOKEN or account credentials. Under the hood, it uses the EXPO_CLI_PASSWORD environment variable to make credentials authentication as secure as possible.

Note, this action only uses your token or credentials to authenticate with Expo. It doesn't store these anywhere.

You can opt-in to caching the installation, making it a lot faster. Under the hood, it uses the @action/cache package to restore the Expo CLI installation. This action generates a unique cache key for the OS, used packager, and exact version of the Expo CLI. If you need more control over this cache, you can define a custom cache key with expo-cache-key.

Note, this cache will count towards your repo cache limit. The Expo and EAS CLI are stored in different caches.

When you run expo publish or expo build, a new bundle is created. Creating these bundles require quite some resources. As of writing, GitHub actions has some small default values for the fs.inotify settings. Inside this action, we included a patch that increases these limits for the current workflow. It increases the max_user_instances, max_user_watches and max_queued_events to 524288. You can disable this patch by setting the patch-watchers to false.