Become a React Native DevOps developer with App Center and CodePush

Unlike other platforms, mobile is a unique environment which requires comprehensive knowledge of the development lifecycle.

Before CI/CD, mobile developers must handle many tedious works in order to deliver the app to user devices. Therefore, adopting mobile DevOps process is a game changer in the world of mobile development. It ensures smooth operations by allowing all teams to execute assigned tasks within the shortest time possible.

This article focuses on how to setup a CI/CD process with App Center and CodePush, integrating into a React Native Android app, to automate every build, test and distribute processes.

Add your mobile application. In this article, I use React Native to deploy a mobile app on Android OS.

Select Build section on the left menu, then select your repository service.

After successfully link App Center to your project repo, it will show your repo’s branches here. You can select and Configure build for each branch.

You can configure many useful tasks like:

After automating your app’s build process, you need to sign it with a keystore in order to distribute the build version to testers and users.

Finally, try to push a new commit to your repo, App Center will run test and build a new version according to your configuration, then it will notify your users to download the newly created version of your app.

Simply put, CodePush helps you deliver live updates of your React Native app to users in the following scheme:

CodePush significantly reduces many repetitive tasks like:

To setup CodePush, open App Center and follow these instructions:

In this article, I focus on some frustrating issues I got when integrated CodePush into my React Native Android app

→ Resolve by creating a react-native.config.js file at the root of your project with the following content:

Try checking Android Studio Logcat, if you see this error:

→ Resolve by override getJSBundleFile method of ReactNativeHost:

Related posts:

On the first of September 2012, with the thousands of other freshmen, I arrived at the “best university in Ukraine” — the KPI. I was eager to learn a lot, to discover new things, to create, to work…