Use EAS Update

Learn how to use EAS Update with EAS Build.

EAS Build includes some special affordances for Expo's expo-updates library. In particular, you can configure the channel property in eas.json and EAS Build will take care of updating it in your native project at build time.

This document covers concerns specific to using expo-updates library with EAS Build. For more general information about configuring the library with EAS Update, see Getting started with EAS Update .

Setting the channel for a build profile

Each build profile can be assigned to a channel, so updates for builds produced for a given profile will pull only those releases that are published to its channel.

The following example demonstrates how you might use the "production" channel for production builds, and the "staging" channel for test builds distributed with internal distribution.

{
  "build": {
    "production": {
      "channel": "production"
    },
    "preview": {
      "channel": "staging",
      "distribution": "internal"
    }
  }
}

Binary compatibility and runtime versions

Your native runtime may change on each build, depending on whether you modify the code in a way that changes the API contract with JavaScript. If you publish a JavaScript bundle to a binary with an incompatible native runtime (for example, a function that the JavaScript bundle expects to exist does not exist) then your app may not work as expected, or it may crash.

We recommend using a different runtime version for each binary version of your app. Any time you change the native runtime (in managed apps, this happens when you add or remove a native library, or modify app.json), you should increment the runtime version.

Previewing updates in development builds

Updates published with the runtimeVersion field can't be loaded in Expo Go; instead, you should use expo-dev-client to create a development build.

Environment variables and eas update

Environment variables set on the env field in build profiles are not available when you run eas update. Learn more about using environment variables with EAS Update.