Migrating from Classic Updates to EAS Update

A guide to help migrate from Classic Updates to EAS Update.

EAS Update is the next generation of Expo's updates service. If you're using Classic Updates, this guide will help you upgrade to EAS Update.

Prerequisites

EAS Update requires the following versions or greater:

Expo CLI >= 5.3.0
EAS CLI >= 0.50.0
Expo SDK >= 45.0.0
expo-updates >= 0.13.0

Install EAS CLI

Install EAS CLI:

Terminal

- npm install --global eas-cli

Then, log in with your expo account:

Terminal

- eas login

Configure your project

You'll need to make the following changes to your project:

Initialize your project with EAS Update:

Terminal

- eas update:configure

After this command, you should have two new fields in your Expo config at expo.updates.url and expo.runtimeVersion.

To ensure that updates are compatible with the underlying native code inside a build, EAS Update uses a new field named runtimeVersion that replaces the sdkVersion field in your project's app config. Remove the expo.sdkVersion property from your app config.

To allow updates to apply to builds built with EAS, update your EAS build profiles in eas.json to include channel properties. These channels should replace any releaseChannel properties. We find it convenient to name the channel after the profile's name. For instance, the preview profile has a channel named "preview" and the production profile has a channel named "production".

eas.json

{
  "build": {
    "development": {
      "developmentClient": true,
      "distribution": "internal"
    },
    "preview": {
      "distribution": "internal",
      "channel": "preview"
    },
    "production": {
      "channel": "production"
    }
  }
}

Optional: If your project is a bare React Native project, see Use EAS Update in an existing project for the extra configuration you may need.

Create new builds

The changes above affect the native code layer inside builds, which means you'll need to make new builds. Once your builds are complete, you'll be ready to develop an update and publish it.

Publishing an update

After making a change to your project locally, you're ready to publish an update, run:

Terminal

- eas update --branch [branch-name] --message [message]

# Example

- eas update --branch production --message "Fixes typo"

EAS Update adds a new idea called a "branch". A branch is a list of updates, and it is mapped to a channel. In the diagram below, builds with a channel of "production" are linked to a branch named "production". By default, channels and branches of the same name are linked until changed. By default, this behaves like the Classic Updates service.

Channel "production" linked to branch "production"

Additional possible migration steps

Replace instances of expo publish with eas update. You can view all the options for publishing with eas update --help.
If you have any code that references Updates.releaseChannel from the expo-updates library, replace them with Updates.channel.
Remove any code that references Constants.manifest. That will now always return null. If you're using SDK 46 or above, you can access most properties you'll need with Constants.expoConfig from the expo-constants library.

If you run into issues or have feedback, join us on Discord in the #update channel.