Can I configure eas build to skip pod install?

[h.ank]

Hi! I’m working on a project that commits our ios/Pods directory to version control. When running eas build, the pod install step is still run. Is there a way I can configure eas build to skip this step, and just use the pods that are checked into the repo? It would save us ~13 minutes of build time.

eas version: eas-cli/0.40.0 darwin-arm64 node-v16.2.0

[wkozyra]

We do not provide any way to do this, but it’s possible if you are fine with hacky solutions. You could replace pod binary with some script that does nothing, e.g you could do that in eas-build-pre-install hook.

We could consider adding a flag in eas.json or some different convenient way of switching, but there is no clear use-case where it would be useful. Can you describe why this is needed? why do you want to commit Pods?

To answer few of the most common arguments:

• committing your Pods directory does not help with guaranteeing that the same native code will be used, most of the react-native dependencies are in node_modeules not in Pods directory
• there is no reason to think it would be faster, if your Pods directory is large uploading it to EAS will take long time and if that dir is small then pod install should also be fast
• if you are committing your Pods, pod install on the eas should be a lot faster. eg. when I tested that, pod install took 1 min 30 seconds without Pods in repo and 15 seconds after I committed Pods directory(minimal project + flipper)
• your project might not work without pod install, e.g. if pod from node modules needs to do some setup on pod install it would never be called.