Build standalone without publishing

Does ‘exp build’ do an automatic publish behind the scenes?

If we wanted to do all upgrades via the app stores, would making a standalone build already update all of the customers in the field before they go ahead and upgrade themselves via the app store?

Thanks

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Yes, exp build does publish as part of the process. We have a feature request to make this configurable, and are working on it. If your app isn’t detached, then the only thing which will break is if you publish to a newer SDK version than the currently installed clients support. Standalone app clients are set up to only request the newest code for the newest SDK version they support, so that won’t cause any problems.

If you’ve detached the app, this is a bit trickier and a good solution will depend on us having a staging vs. production notion for JS bundles. We have a feature request for this as well: Support multiple release channels | Voters | Expo. It’ll take a bit of time to build. In the meantime, some users work around this by maintaining two separate app slugs or two separate accounts and leapfrogging them.

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Any update on this? Is the feature up and available?

Yes, you can pass --no-publish to the build command to avoid publishing at the same time.

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Hi Ben, thanks a ton for having implemented this, if I’m not mistaken the version for this update is [49.0.1] (https://github.com/expo/exp/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md), how can we get such exp version? I tried running npm update -g exp but version remains exp@46.0.6!
Thanks

maybe you installed it with yarn @ziudeso? yarn global add exp

Hi @notbrent, thanks for the hint! Sorted out by npm uninstall -g exp and then npm install -g exp again! Now version is exp@49.2.2! Cheers

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Quick question, the --no-publish will skip publishing but will use the build previously published, is there a way to just build a standalone app with the build from local? This way if I want to update one platform, the other will not be updated||

Thanks

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@stefanama - no way to build standalone from local, must be published. i’d recommend creating different release channels for ios and android if you want to update each platform independently

Is there any updates on this feature ?
Can I use the release channel for stagings environments like alpha/beta/production ?

You can build from local using Turtle CLI Building Standalone Apps on Your CI - Expo Documentation