- 📦 Download and Setup
- ✍️ Editing SDK Packages
- ⏱ Testing Your Changes
- 📚 Updating Documentation
- 📝 Writing a Commit Message
- 🔎 Before Submitting
Thanks for your interest in contributing! We currently review PRs for packages/
, docs/
, templates/
, guides/
, apps/
, and markdown files.
We recommend that folks interested in contributing to the SDK use the apps/bare-expo
project in their SDK development workflow instead of Expo Go (in apps/expo-go
). The Expo Go app is difficult to set up and requires API tokens.
The bare-expo
project includes most of the Expo SDK. It runs the JavaScript code from apps/test-suite
and apps/native-component-list
. That allows you to browse the Expo SDK components and APIs and easily write and run E2E tests for iOS, and Android for any given SDK package. Unit tests can be written within the SDK package itself. When pushed to the remote, CI will run this project with tests for Android/iOS and report the results on your pull request.
Manual smoke tests are included in apps/native-component-list
, which is a good fit for demos or tests that require physical interactions. This is particularly useful if you are testing interactions with UI components, or if there is something very difficult to test in an automated way but would be easy to verify through manual interaction.
💡 How does
bare-expo
relate totest-suite
?
bare-expo
is a bare React Native app that links all of the Expo SDK dependencies in thepackages/
directory in order to be able to run projects in theapps/
directory. It currently runstest-suite
(an Expo app with some custom code to turn it into a test runner), andnative-component-list
. If you runexpo start
in thetest-suite
directory you can load the project in Expo Go.bare-expo
imports thetest-suite
app root component and uses it as its own root component.
💽 The development environment for this repository does not support Windows; WSL is required to contribute from Windows.
- If you are an Expo team member, clone the repository. If you are an external contributor, fork this repository to your own GitHub account and then clone it to your local device. (
git remote add upstream [email protected]:expo/expo.git
😉). You can usegit clone --depth 1 --single-branch --branch main [email protected]:expo/expo.git
, skipping most of the branches and history to clone it faster. - Install direnv. On macOS:
brew install direnv
. Don't forget to install the shell hook to your shell profile. - Install git-lfs. On macOS:
brew install git-lfs
. - Install Node LTS.
If you plan to contribute to the documentation, run npm run setup:docs
.
If you plan to contribute to Android, run npm run setup:native
. This command does the following for you:
- Downloads submodules (like
react-native
) withgit submodule update --init
- Ensures Yarn is installed
- Ensures your computer is set up for React Native (will install the Android NDK if it's not present)
- Downloads the Node packages (
yarn install
)
We recommend JDK 17 (eg. zulu17). Run the following commands in a terminal window to install it:
brew tap homebrew/cask-versions
brew install --cask zulu@17
After you install the JDK, add the JAVA_HOME environment variable in ~/.bash_profile (or ~/.zshrc if you use ZSH):
export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/zulu-17.jdk/Contents/Home
ANDROID_SDK_ROOT
environmental variable should be set or configured via local.properties
file in android
folder of the native project you're working with.
If you will be working with the iOS project, ensure ruby 3.3 is installed on your machine. macOS comes with ruby 2.6, which is not supported in this repository; if you use Homebrew you can just run brew install [email protected]
. You will also need to have the latest stable version of Xcode installed, along with Xcode command line tools.
-
Navigate to the bare sandbox project
cd apps/bare-expo
-
Run the project on any native platform:
- iOS:
yarn ios
- Android:
yarn android
- If you are working on Linux, make sure to set the
TERMINAL
environment variable to your preferred terminal application. (e.g.export TERMINAL="konsole"
)
- iOS:
-
You are now running the
test-suite
app via thebare-expo
project. The next section explains how you can begin to make changes to SDK packages.
If this didn't work for you as described, please open an issue.
All Expo SDK packages can be found in the packages/
directory. These packages are automatically linked to the projects in the apps/
directory, so you can edit them in-place and see the changes in the running app.
- Navigate to a package you want to edit. Ex:
cd packages/expo-constants
- Start the TypeScript build in watch mode:
yarn build
- Edit code in that package's
src/
directory - Play with your changes on a simulator or device through
bare-expo
:- Add or modify a file named after the API you're working on. Ex:
apps/test-suite/tests/Constants.js
- To see native changes, you will need to run the
test-suite
with theapps/bare-expo
project usingyarn <android | ios>
. - If you are only making JavaScript changes, you can run
test-suite
from theapps/test-suite
project usingexpo start
. - To run the full test suite, you can run the tests
yarn test:<android | ios>
.
- Add or modify a file named after the API you're working on. Ex:
- You can edit a package's native code directly from its respective folder in the
packages/
directory or by openingbare-expo
in a native editor:- Navigate to the
bare-expo
app directory:cd apps/bare-expo
- Android Studio:
yarn edit:android
- Xcode:
yarn edit:ios
- Remember to rebuild the native project whenever you make a native change
- Navigate to the
If you don't have something in mind already, the best way to find something to help with is "Issue accepted" label.
Note that we generally do not accept PRs that bump versions of native dependencies. The Expo team handles bumping these dependencies as part of our release process for each Expo SDK. The process for pulling in a new version and adequately requires a fair amount of context on how Expo Go works.
All modules should adhere to the style guides which can be found here:
- Creating Unimodules
- Expo JS Style Guide (also mostly applies to TypeScript)
- Updating Changelogs
- The React Native dev tools are currently disabled in our fork #5602. You can hack around this by cloning React Native outside this repo, then copying the contents
react-native/React/DevSupport
intoexpo/react-native-lab/react-native/React/DevSupport
(this will only enable the shake gesture, CMD+R won't work yet). - We use a fork of
react-native
in this repo; this fork is located atreact-native-lab/react-native
(you can make changes or cherry-picks from here if you want). It diverges the minimal amount necessary from thereact-native
version in itspackage.json
. - All of the package's
build/
code should be committed. This is because it is simpler to reproduce issues if all contributors are running the same code and so we don't need to rebuild dozens of packages locally on everygit pull
orgit checkout
operation. - We use a unified set of basic Bash scripts and configs called
expo-module-scripts
to ensure everything runs smoothly (TypeScript, Babel, Jest, etc...).
You'll need write about how you tested your changes in the PR under the Test Plan section.
The best way to get your changes merged is to build good tests for them! We have three different kinds of tests: unit-tests, automated E2E tests, and demos (adding tests that you notice are missing is a great way to become my friend 🥳)!
- Create a test for your feature in the appropriate package's
src/__tests__
directory (if the file doesn't exist already, create it with the*-test.ts
or*-test.tsx
extension). - Any new bridged native functions have to be added to the jest-expo package to ensure they are mocked. To help you do this more easily, we've written a tool and a guide on how to do this. Check out Generating Jest Mocks!
- Run the test with
yarn test
and ensure it handles all platforms (iOS, Android, and web). If the feature doesn't support a platform, then you can exclude it by putting your test in a file with a platform extension like:.test.ios.ts
,.test.native.ts
,.test.web.ts
... - You can also test platforms one at a time by pressing X and selecting the platform you want to test!
- Write your tests in
apps/test-suite/tests
- These tests are written with a non-feature-complete version of Jasmine that runs on the Android and iOS clients, so no special features like snapshot testing will be available.
- If you created a new test file, be sure to add it in
apps/test-suite/TestUtils.js
. - If the new test file could be running automatically from the
bare-expo
testing, add it inapps/bare-expo/e2e/TestSuite-test.native.js
.
- Run your tests locally from the
bare-expo
directory withyarn test:android
, oryarn test:ios
.- It's important you test locally because native CI tests can be fragile, take a while to finish, and be frustrating when they fail.
- Remember to try and get your feature running on as many platforms as possible.
Thanks again for helping to make sure that Expo is stable for everyone!
Our docs are made with Next.js. They're located in the docs directory. For more information look at the docs/README.md.
TL;DR:
- Navigate to the docs directory and run
yarn
. - Start the project with
yarn dev
(make sure you don't have another server running on port3002
). - Navigate to the docs you want to edit:
cd docs/pages/
. - If you update an older version, ensure the relevant changes are copied into
docs/pages/versions/unversioned/
for API docs.
If this is your first time committing to a large public repo, you could look through this neat tutorial: "How to Write a Git Commit Message"
Commit messages are most useful when formatted like so: [platform][api] Title
. For example, if you fix a bug in the package expo-video
for iOS, you could write: [ios][video] Fixed black screen bug that appears on older devices
.
To help keep CI green, please make sure of the following:
- Remember to add a concise description of any user-facing changes to
CHANGELOG.md
file in the package you've changed or root's CHANGELOG.md if your changes don't apply to any package. This is especially helpful for breaking changes! - If you modified anything in
packages/
:- You transpiled the TypeScript with
yarn build
in the directory of whichever package you modified. - Run
yarn lint --fix
to fix the formatting of the code. Ensure thatyarn lint
succeeds without errors or warnings. - Run
yarn test
to ensure all existing tests pass for that package, along with any new tests you would've written. - All
console.log
s or commented out code blocks are removed!
- You transpiled the TypeScript with
- If you edited the docs directory:
- Any change to the current SDK version should also be in the unversioned copy as well. Example:
- You fixed a typo in
docs/pages/versions/vXX.0.0/sdk/app-auth.md
- Ensure you copy that change to:
docs/pages/versions/unversioned/sdk/app-auth.md
- You fixed a typo in
- You don't need to run the docs tests locally. Just ensure the links you include aren't broken, the format is correct, and the changes are following our writing style guide.
- Any change to the current SDK version should also be in the unversioned copy as well. Example:
- Our CI tests will finish early if you don't make changes to certain directories. If you want to get results faster then you should make changes to docs directory in one PR, and changes to anything else in another!