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Expo monorepo

Fast pnpm monorepo for cross-platform apps built with Expo and React

Why is it fast?  —  How to use it  —  Structure  —  Workflows  —  Caveats & Issues


⚡ Why is it fast?

This repository uses both pnpm and Turborepo to speed things up, by a lot. With pnpm, we leverage the installation performance using the global store cache. Turborepo helps us to run certain tasks, and cache the result if we rerun tasks with the same input or code. In the workflows we cache the pnpm store and Turborepo cache using GitHub Actions built-in cache, resulting in the best performance possible.

What about Metro?

In apps/mobile we leverage the Metro cache to speed up building and publishing. We use Turborepo to restore or invalidate this cache. To populate this Metro cache, the apps/mobile has a $ pnpm build script that exports React Native bundles. The resulting Metro cache is then reused when publishing previews.

ℹ️ Should I use it?

This repository demonstrates a working stack using Expo in a fast monorepo, while sharing most of the codebase with web. The primary goal of this repository is to showcase what is possible with Expo while keeping the code as "vanilla" as possible. Feel free to use this repository however you prefer, but when starting a project from scratch, consider a template with more assumptions. Those assumptions should help you develop your project faster than this repository can.

🚀 How to use it

You can use and modify this repository however you want. If you want to use EAS to build your app, you'll need to create an Expo access token and set it as EXPO_TOKEN GitHub actions secret.

To run the repository locally, run these two commands:

  • $ pnpm install - This installs all required Node libraries using pnpm.
  • $ pnpm dev - Starts the development servers for all apps.

Commands

Because this monorepo uses Turborepo, you don't need to run additional commands to set things up. Whenever you run $ pnpm build, it will build all packages if they aren't built yet. In this monorepo we use a few commands or pipelines:

  • $ pnpm dev - Build and watch all apps and packages for development.
  • $ pnpm lint - Analyze the source code of all apps and packages using ESLint.
  • $ pnpm test - Run all tests for packages with Jest tests.
  • $ pnpm build - Build all apps and packages for production or to publish them on npm.

When developing or deploying a single app, you might not need the development server for all apps. For example, if you need to make a fix in the mobile app, you don't need the web development server. Or when deploying a single app to production, you only need to build that single app with all dependencies.

This monorepo uses a simple npm script convention of dev:<app-name> and build:<app-name> to keep this process simple. Under the hood, it uses Turborepo's workspace filtering, defined as an npm script in the root package.json.

  • $ pnpm dev:mobile - Build and watch app/mobile and all packages used in mobile, for development.
  • $ pnpm dev:web - Build and watch app/web and all packages used in web, for development.
  • $ pnpm build:mobile - Build apps/mobile and all packages used in mobile, for production deployments
  • $ pnpm build:web - Build apps/web and all packages used in web, for production deployments

Switching to bun, yarn or npm

You can use any package manager with Expo. If you want to use bun, yarn, or pnpm, instead of pnpm, all you have to do is:

  • Remove .npmrc, pnpm-lock.yaml, and pnpm-workspace.yaml.
  • Remove the pnpm property from the root package.json file.
  • Add the workspaces property to the root package.json file.
  • Update the workflows to use bun, yarn, or npm instead.

Warning

Unfortunately, npm does not support the workspace protocol. You also have to change the "<package>": "workspace:*" references to just "<package>": "*" for npm.

📁 Structure

  • apps - Apps that only use packages and aren't aware of other apps.
  • packages - Packages that may use external and/or other monorepo packages.

Apps

  • apps/mobile - Expo app using eslint-config and feature-home packages.
  • apps/web - Next.js app using eslint-config and feature-home packages.

Packages

  • packages/eslint-config - Preconfigured ESLint configuration for each app or package.
  • packages/feature-home - Shared React Native domain-logic for apps, using both ui and eslint-config packages.
  • packages/ui - Shared React Native UI components for apps, using the eslint-config package.

👷 Workflows

  • build - Starts the EAS builds for apps/mobile using the given profile.
  • preview - Publishes apps to a PR-specific release channel and adds a QR code to that PR.
  • test - Ensures that the apps and packages are healthy on multiple OSs.

Composite workflows

  • setup-monorepo - Reusable composite workflow to setup the monorepo in GitHub Actions.

⚠️ Caveats

Installing multiple React Native versions

React Native is a complex library, split over multiple different packages. Unfortunately, React Native only supports a single version per monorepo. When using multiple different versions, things might break in unexpected ways without proper error reporting.

You can check if your monorepo is installing multiple versions of React Native with the npm list command, supported by all major package managers:

$ npm why react-native
$ yarn why react-native

# Bun doesn't have `bun why` (yet), but you can use `yarn why` instead
$ bun install --yarn && yarn why react-native

# pnpm needs `--recursive` to search in all workspaces within the monorepo
$ pnpm why --recursive react-native

If you are using multiple versions, try to update all package.json files, or use an overrides/resolutions in the root package.json to force only one React Native version.

Using environment variables in React Native

Reusing Metro caches can be dangerous if you use Babel plugins like transform-inline-environment-variables. When using Babel plugins to swap out environment variables for their actual value, you are creating a dependency on environment variables. Because Metro is unaware of dependencies on environment variables, Metro might reuse an incorrect cached environment variable.

Since Turborepo handles the cache in this repository, we can leverage caching based on environment variables. This invalidates the Metro cache whenever certain environment variables are changed and avoid reusing incorrect cached code.

Tip

Expo now supports .env files out-of-the-box. This also means that Metro is now smart enough to invalidate the cache whenever these variables change. There is no need to do this manually anymore.

pnpm workarounds

In the current React Native ecosystem, there are a lot of implicit dependencies. These can be from the native code that is shipped within packages, or even implicit dependencies through installing a specific version of Expo or React Native. In the newer package managers like pnpm, you will run into issues due to these implicit dependencies. Besides that there are other issues like Metro not following symlinks.

To workaround these issues, we have to change some config:

  1. Let pnpm generate a flat node_modules folder, without symlinks. You can do that by creating a root .npmrc file containing (node-linker=hoisted). This works around two things; no Metro symlink support, and having a simple way to determine where the modules are installed (see point 3).

  2. Either disable strict-peer-dependencies or add peerDependencyRules.ignoreMissing rules in the package.json. This disables some of the expected implicit peer dependencies issues. Without these changes, pnpm will fail on install asking you to install various peer dependencies.

  3. Update the metro.config.js configuration for usage in monorepos. Full explanation per configuration option can be found in the Expo docs. The only addition in this repository is the config.cacheStores. This change moves the Metro cache to a place which is accessible by Turborepo, our main cache handler (see Why is it fast?).

Precompile packages

EAS only sends the files which are committed to the repository. That means the packages/*/build folders need to be generated before building our apps. To tell EAS how to compile our packages, we can use the postinstall hook.

Running EAS from apps directories

As of writing, the eas build command needs to be executed from the package folder itself. EAS will still create a tarball with all files from your monorepo, but runs the build commands from this local folder. You can see this happening in the build workflow.

Using local credentials in CI

If you want to maintain the keystore or certificates yourself, you have to configure EAS with local credentials. When your CI provider doesn't allow you to add "secret files", you can encode these files to base64 strings and decode whenever you need it.

It's highly recommended to keep keystores and certificates out of your repository to avoid security issues.

❌ Common issues

No ongoing issues, we are actively monitoring and fixing potential issues


with :heart:  byCedric