Get started

Install the latest EAS CLI

EAS CLI is the command line app you will use to interact with EAS services from your terminal. To install it, run the command:

You can also use the above command to check if a new version of EAS CLI is available. We encourage you to always stay up to date with the latest version.

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

Log in to your Expo account

If you are already signed in to an Expo account using Expo CLI, you can skip the steps described in this section. If you are not, run the following command to log in:

You can check whether you are logged in by running eas whoami.

Create a project

Create a project by running:

Configure your project

To configure your project, run the following commands in the order they are specified:

After running these commands, eas.json file will be created in the root directory of your project.

Inside the preview and production build profiles in eas.json, add a channel property for each:

{
  "build": {
    "preview": {
      "channel": "preview"
      // ...
    },
    "production": {
      "channel": "production"
      // ...
    }
  }
}

The channel allows you to point updates at builds of that profile. For example, if we set up a GitHub Action to publish changes on merge, it will make it so that we can merge code into the "production" Git branch. Then, each commit will trigger a GitHub Action that will publish an update which will be available to builds with the channel "production".

Optional: If your project is a bare React Native project, see Updating bare app for any additional configuration.

Create a build for the project

You need to create a build for Android or iOS. We recommend creating a build with the preview build profile first. See Create your first build on how to get started and set up Internal distribution for your device or simulator.

Once you have a build running on your device or a simulator, you are ready to send an update.

Make changes locally

After creating the build, you are ready to iterate on the project. Start a local development server with the following command:

Then, make any desired changes to your project's JavaScript, styling, or image assets.

Publish an update

To publish an update to the build, run the following command:

Once the update is built and uploaded to EAS and the command completes, force close and reopen your app up to two times to download and view the update. By default, expo-updates checks for updates every time the app is loaded. However, you can also implement a custom strategy with the Updates API and app config. If your app is not updating as expected, validate your configuration.