Hi Expo Team,
One thing I’m still struggling to understand from the documentation for EAS Submit:
when submitting with eas submit --platform ios, the app binary is delivered to TestFlight. This works wonderfully well for our CI down our “test” profile. Is there to make EAS Submit deliver the app all the way to the live App Store?
All guides I have found (and all actions I have taken when developing) seem to indicate that TestFlight is as far as EAS submit can take things, and that it requires either manual work to promote to the actual App Store, or else a different CI path to do the delivery to the App Store (which I currently do via fastlane on a specific macOS machine).
I have considered using the eas-build-pre-upload-artifacts script as an opportunity to grab the .ipa file and use fastlane deliver on the EAS Build servers to deliver the app binary at that point, but I’m wary of experimenting and expect I am just missing something straightforward.
Also, though implicit above, I should note that we use release channels to run everything on our test channel for initial testing, before pushing everything to our production channel.
Any advice?
Many thanks,
Nathan
The apple app store requires its own review process and form completion before you can submit to the app store. Once eas submit successfully gets your build to Testflight you can then submit for review manually.
I have not seen any documentation on this functionality existing via expo. Good luck!
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expo tools can get your app built and submitted to apple, but to go from there to testflight, and to fill in metadata and submit the uploaded app for review, you need to use the apple developer portal currently. we don’t document this at the moment because it would be a bit redundant given the variety of other resources out there handling this topic. that said, we’re working on extending functionality to help further with submissions, including metadata and submitting to testflight automatically.
Hi notbrent,
Hmm… I’m using the EAS CLI as mentioned previously (not the Expo CLI), so uploading to Testflight is automatically part of EAS Submit, so I’m bemused by your comment that doing that needs the Apple Developer Portal. I am already able to set out CI pipeline to automatically deploy to our internal testers using Testflight.
However, if I understand you correctly, you are stating that it is not possible to go further, i.e. creating a new Production version on the Apple App Store, so we would need to either use Fastlane to finish this section off, or else doing this manually as you describe.
Whilst I agree it isn’t worth documenting actions that are taken on another site (especially if those can be liable to change), I think it is still worth being specific about the fact that EAS Submit can ONLY go as far as deploying to TestFlight, and that manual steps are required to push to production.
As williamjones has stated above, there appears to be no documentation on any such functionality for pushing to production, but ‘appears to be’ is my summary after several hours reading and re-reading any related article on your docs site. It would be VERY helpful to be explicit about what is NOT possible in that Submitting to App Store article, so that others like me can find a simple answer quickly.
Furthermore, please could you answer my (perhaps too subtle) question above - could I use the eas-build-pre-upload-artifacts step to use Fastlane on the EAS Build server?
Many thanks,
Nathan