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Using Bitrise CI for React Native apps
After trying Travis, CircleCI and BuddyBuild, I now choose Bitrise for my mobile applications. The many cool steps and workflows make Bitrise an ideal CI to try. Like any other CIs, the learning steps and configurations can be intimidating at first. Things that work locally can fail on CI, and how to send things that are marked as git ignore to be used in CI builds are popular issues.
In this post I will show how to deploy React Native apps for both iOS and Android. The key thing to remember is to have the same setup on CI as you have locally. They are to ensure exact same versions for packages and tools, to be aware of file patterns in gitignore as those changes won’t be there on CI, and how to property use environment variables and secured files.
This post tried to be intuitive with lots of screenshots. Hope you learn something and avoid the wasted hours that I have been too.
Support for React Native
In its simplest sense, React Native is just Javascript code with native iOS and Android projects, and Bitrise has a very good support for React Native. It scans ios and android folder, and give suggestion about scheme and build variants to build.
Another good thing about Bitrise is its various useful steps and workflows. Unlike other CIs where we have to spend days on how to property edit the configuration file, Bitrise has a pretty good UI to add and edit steps. Steps are just custom scripts, and we can write pretty much what we like. Most of the predefined steps are open source. Here are a few
Building for iOS
Unless you use the step Build with Simulator , you will need provisioning profile and certificates with private keys in order to build for devices.
Install React Native & npm install
React Native moves fast and break things. If you don’t have same version of React Native, you will have hard time figuring out why the builds constantly fail on CI.
