Expo and release channels…how to recognise dev/prod and a real channel

I'm having some troubles with expo release channels.
I'm not expert about React Native and Expo which makes things much more easier :

If I work with my local development environment, the channel will not be set ( which makes sense ).

But also the final release or "production" will not have a channel set,
which makes very unclear how I should recognize 'production' and 'development'.

Then a new complexity level is added if I want to add a channel...like 'staging', which will have instead a channel...

The icing on the cake is that in my deployment system (Circle) I have to build 'development' in a channel ( otherwise NODE_ENV will be "production" )

Did someone figure out how to use channels correctly? :)

basically, I didn't find a solution better than this one:

import Constants from 'expo'
const ENV= production:,staging:,development:

// Having fun with channels
const channel = Constants.manifest.releaseChannel;
if (channel === null || channel === undefined || channel === '')
if (process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production')
return ENV.production;

if (process.env.NODE_ENV === 'development')
return ENV.development;


if (channel === 'staging')
return ENV.staging;

if (channel === 'development')
return ENV.development;

return ENV.production;

Thank you so much!

1 Answer
1

I think you're missing point what are release channels for.

When your app is built with exp build it is bind to one release channel (default as default).
Later, if you want to do an OTA update, you can just run exp publish which will publish your code on the release channel (again: default as default).

exp build

default

exp publish

default

When you ship a standalone build to your users, you don't want to give them untested code etc via OTA, so you want users to have release channel set to ex. prod.

prod

This is completely separated from NODE_ENV and I don't really see a point in tying them.

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