Are you ready to bring your app idea to life? With EAS Build, you can create a ready-to-submit binary of your app for the Google Play Store or Apple App Store. In this guide, we'll walk you through the process of creating your first build.

Prerequisites

Before diving in, make sure you have the following:

  • A React Native Android and/or iOS project that you want to build (or create a new one using npx create-expo-app my-app)
  • An Expo user account (sign up at https://expo.dev/signup)
  • Paid subscribers get quality improvements such as additional build concurrencies, priority access to minimize the time your builds spend queueing, and increased limits on build timeouts. Learn more about different plans and benefits at EAS pricing.

Install the Latest EAS CLI

To interact with EAS services from your terminal, install the latest EAS CLI by running the command:

npm install -g eas-cli

We recommend using npm instead of yarn for global package installations. You may alternatively use npx eas-cli@latest. Remember to use eas whenever it's called for in the documentation.

Configure the Project

To configure an Android or iOS project for EAS Build, run the following command:

eas build:configure

For development, we recommend creating a development build, which is a debug build of your app and contains the expo-dev-client library. It helps you iterate as quickly as possible and provides a more flexible, reliable, and complete development environment. To install the library, run the following command:

npx expo install expo-dev-client

Additional configuration may be required for some scenarios:

  • Does your app code depend on environment variables? Add them to your build configuration.
  • Is your project inside of a monorepo? Follow these instructions.
  • Do you use private npm packages? Add your npm token.
  • Does your app depend on specific versions of tools like Node, Yarn, npm, CocoaPods, or Xcode? Specify these versions in your build configuration.

Run a Build

You can create a build that you can run on your Android device/emulator or iOS Simulator. Alternatively, you can build for app stores. For the former, follow the steps for creating an installable APK for Android and creating a simulator build for iOS.

For app stores, make sure you have a store developer account and generate or provide app signing credentials. EAS CLI does the heavy lifting for you. Check out the steps for Android app signing credentials or iOS app signing credentials process below for more information.

Google Play Developer membership is required to distribute to the Google Play Store. Apple Developer Program membership is required to build for the Apple App Store. After confirming your account and app signing credentials, proceed with the following set of commands:

  • eas build --platform android
  • eas build --platform ios

You can attach a message to the build by passing --message to the build command, for example: eas build --platform ios --message "Some message". The message will appear on the website. It comes in handy when you want to leave a note with the purpose of the build for your team.

Alternatively, you can use the --platform all option to build for Android and iOS at the same time:

  • eas build --platform all

If you have released your app to stores previously and have existing app signing credentials that you want to use, follow these instructions to configure them.