Review Apps for React-Native

Most of us know review apps from Netlify, which is a kind of game-changer when it comes to staging apps. With Netlify review apps you don’t have one staging environment – but one for every branch/ pull request of your app. This makes that testing your apps just got way easier – one did not need to check if staging was “free” right now, and even small features were quite easy to review, also for non-developers. Now, Netlify is in the end “just” hosting static pages, surely that kind of wizardry could not be done for a stateful backend or even a mobile app, which needs to be rolled out through app stores and has an entire review process for almost every release.

Recently, Heroku launched a new release – we got review apps for our backend now and, I can absolutely recommend it. Basically, it works by creating a new instance of the app for every open pull request on GitHub and initializes it with an empty database, that can then be seeded. But now we were working on a react native app, and I wondered if it might not be possible to achieve something similar here. We were using expo as a framework for the react native app and semaphore for CI already, so I started looking into them some more.

Enter Expo

Expo is a framework/platform for react apps, that enables building native iOS/ android apps without having any native dependencies. Also,  it allows you to open the app without installing – one can use the Expo app to scan a QR Code which immediately downloads the JavaScript bundle from Expo’s servers and runs the App directly on the phone – no USB debugging or side-loading required. Now that got me thinking. Looking through the expo docs I found something called release channels. Release channels are exactly what they sound like, they enable one to have one main default channel and also release to other “channels” in parallel – sounds like a git branch to me. Every release channel also comes with it’s own QR Code, which opens the newest version of the app on that channel, auto-updating on every open.

Enter Semaphore

We already had our CI setup with Semaphore, building the app anew for every release on our main branch. So now, all that was left to do was to adjust our release promotion, so that it would release every branch in its own release-channel and, just for the little cherry on top, push a comment on the pull request with a QR code that directly links to the release channel. After making it work with some bash magic and a little node script I decided to export the functionality into a little npm package: https://github.com/railslove/expositional. Now all that is left to do, is to wrap the expo build script with some expositional goodness: