Publishing Websites

Table of contents

• Building
  • Serving
• AWS Amplify Console
• Netlify
  • Manual deployment with the Netlify CDN
  • Continuous delivery
• GitHub Pages
• Vercel
• Firebase Hosting
• Surge

Creating a Build

• Optimize the assets for speed - npx expo-optimize (formerly expo optimize)
• Bundle the project for production - expo build:web
  • Creates a production ready static bundle in the web-build/ directory. Don't edit this folder directly.
  • Uses Webpack to optimize the project.
  • If you make any changes to your project, you'll need to re-build for production.
  • For more help use expo build:web --help
  • To speed up builds you can skip the PWA asset generation with expo build:web --no-pwa
• You can now deploy or host this anywhere you like.

• Serving your site in a subfolder? Add the path to your package.json:

/* package.json */
{
    "homepage": "/webapp"
}

Serving Locally

• Serve CLI: Quickly test how it works in production - npx serve web-build
• Open http://localhost:5000
• This is http only, so permissions, camera, location, and many other things won't work.

AWS Amplify Console

1. Add the amplify-explicit.yml file to the root of your repo.
2. Push your local Expo project to your GitHub repository. If you haven't pushed to GitHub yet, follow GitHub's guide to add an existing project to GitHub.
3. Login to the Amplify Console and choose Get started under Deploy. Grant Amplify permission to read from your GitHub account or organization that owns your repo.
4. The Amplify Console will detect that the amplify.yml file is in your repo. Choose Next.
5. Review your settings and choose Save and deploy. Your app will now be deployed to a https://branchname.xxxxxx.amplifyapp.com URL.

Vercel

For more information on unlimited hosting, check out their pricing.

1. Install the Vercel CLI.
2. Build your Expo web app with expo build:web.
3. To deploy:

• Run cd web-build
• Run vercel
• You should see a URL that you can use to view your project online.

Surge

project path: /path/to/expo-project/web-build

To support routers that use the HTML 5 pushState API, you'll need to rename the web-build/index.html to web/200.html before deploying.

Netlify

Manual deployment with the Netlify CDN

npm install netlify-cli -g
netlify deploy

Continuous delivery

1. Start a new Netlify project
2. Pick your Git hosting service and select your repository
3. Click Build your site

GitHub Pages

We'll use yarn but you can use npm if you want.

git init
git remote add origin <YOUR_GITHUB_PAGES_URL>
yarn add -D gh-pages

/* package.json */
{
    "homepage": "http://evanbacon.github.io/expo-gh-pages",
    "scripts": {
        "deploy": "gh-pages -d web-build",
        "predeploy": "expo build:web"
    }
}

yarn deploy

1. Initialize a git repo

• This is probably already done, but if not then you'll want to run git init and set the remote.

  $ git init
  Initialized empty Git repository in /path/to/expo-gh-pages/.git/
  

1. Add the GitHub repository as a "remote" in your local git repository

   $ git remote add origin https://github.com/evanbacon/expo-gh-pages.git
   

   • This will make it so the gh-pages package knows where you want it to deploy your app.
   • It will also make it so git knows where you want it to push your source code (i.e. the commits on your master branch).
2. Install the gh-pages package as a "dev-dependency" of the app

   yarn add -D gh-pages
   

3. Configure your package.json for web hosting
   • At the top level, add a homepage property. Set it's value to the string http://{username on github, without the curly brackets}.github.io/{repo-name}. For example: If my GitHub name is evanbacon and my GitHub repository is expo-gh-pages, I'll asign the following:

   /* ... */
   "homepage": "http://evanbacon.github.io/expo-gh-pages"
   

   • In the existing scripts property, add a predeploy property and a deploy property, each having the values shown below:

   "scripts": {
     /* ... */
     "deploy": "gh-pages -d web-build",
     "predeploy": "expo build:web"
   }
   

   predeploy is automatically run before deploy.

4. Generate a production build of your app, and deploy it to GitHub Pages. (2 minutes)

   $ yarn deploy
   

   • !! Your app is now available at the URL you set as homepage in your package.json (call your parents and show them! 😜)

   When you publish code to gh-pages, it will create and push the code to a branch in your repo called gh-pages. This branch will have your built code but not your development source code.

Firebase Hosting

Setup Firebase

• Create a firebase project with the Firebase Console.
• Install the Firebase CLI if you haven’t already by following these instructions.
• Run the firebase login command, then promptly log in.
• Run the firebase init command, select your project and hosting.
• When asked about the public path, make sure to specify the web-build folder.
• Answer 'Configure as a single-page app (rewrite all urls to /index.html)' with 'Yes'.

Update package.json

"scripts": {
  /* ... */
  "predeploy": "expo build:web",
  "deploy-hosting": "npm run predeploy && firebase deploy --only hosting",
}

  "hosting": [
    {
      /* ... */
 "headers": [
        {
          "source": "/**",
          "headers": [
            {
              "key": "Cache-Control",
              "value": "no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate"
            }
          ]
        },
        {
          "source": "**/*.@(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|svg|webp|js|css|eot|otf|ttf|ttc|woff|woff2|font.css)",
          "headers": [
            {
              "key": "Cache-Control",
              "value": "max-age=604800"
            }
          ]
        }
      ],
    }
  ]