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Migrate from Classic Updates

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

SDK 49 will be the last version to support Classic Updates. To continue using the deprecated expo publish command, set updates.useClassicUpdates in your app config.

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

1

Install EAS CLI:

Terminal
- npm install --global eas-cli

2

Then, log in with your expo account:

Terminal
- eas login

Configure your project

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

1

Initialize your project with EAS Update:

Terminal
- eas update:configure

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

2

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.

3

To allow updates to apply to builds built with EAS, update your EAS Build profiles in eas.json to include channel properties. These channels replace 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"
    }
  }
}

4

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 to start sending updates. Once your builds are complete, you'll be ready to publish an update.

Publish an update

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

Terminal
- eas update --channel [channel-name] --message [message]

# Example
- eas update --channel production --message "Fixes typo"

Once published, you can see the update in the Expo dashboard.

Additional migration steps

  • Replace instances of expo publish with eas update in scripts. 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.

Learn more

The steps described above allow you to use a similar flow to Classic Updates. However, EAS Update is more flexible and has more features. It can be used to create more stable release flows. Learn how EAS Update works and how you can craft a more stable deployment process for your project and your team.

If you experience issues with migrating, check out our debugging guide. If you have feedback, join us on Discord in the #update channel.