Category: React Native

App Center and React Native Upgrades

I hit a very strange problem recently with Microsoft App Centre which I’ve been happily using to build and distribute a React Native app that was sat at version 0.55.

React Native 0.55 -> 0.56 was quite a big change as it adopted the new Xcode build system and bumped the minimum node version.

I needed to update the app to be compatible with Apple’s requirements and so spent some time moving it along to React Native 0.59. All seemed to be going fine and I was able to run a build through App Centre from my development / feature branch.

I merged this into master, did a diff to ensure my feature and master branches were identical, and pushed it to App Centre. And the build assigned to this branch failed – for some reason it wasn’t selecting the correct node version and I saw this error:

error react-native@0.59.3: The engine "node" is incompatible with this module. Expected version ">=8.3". Got "6.17.0"

The build definitions were identical and the source code was identical, I checked the App Centre agent version and it was the same too. I spent some time with a support team member who was helpful but ultimately as confused as me and attempted to force the node version selection with a post clone script. That didn’t work either but gave me a different error. An error that suggested that the build was now using node 8.

I scratched my head for a while and realised what I’d done. I’d opened the build definition and pressed save after adding the post clone script. You need to do this to get App Centre to see new and updated custom build scripts.

Of course it then dawned on me – App Centre isn’t figuring out the node version to use after cloning – its doing it at the same time it looks for custom build scripts. When you press save on a build definition. And I’d almost certainly inspected the build definition (looking for things I might need to change) on the first branch I tried and hit save.

I removed the post clone script and everything worked as expected.

Well perhaps not as expected – this really isn’t helpful behaviour from App Centre, confusing to both users and support staff, that hopefully they will resolve. You really expect your project to be built based on its assets at the time of build – not part from this and part from what is effectively the result of inspecting an earlier snapshot.

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GiottoPress by Enrique Chavez