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Bitrise CI template for a React native app

Here is a conceptual monopipeline for building and deploying a React native app to the app stores in Bitrise. The described pipeline serves us well, and I discuss the benefits and tradeoffs in the afterword.


Setting up .env and release method

The first step is for the CI machinery to overwrite or add relevant environment variables based on the branch/tag. You can already at this point determine if this pipeline will release the app to the stores or just run through the build.

Run linters and tests, check test coverage

For TS/JS, these can be just npm scripts in the Bitrise npm step. For native code, you can use the predefined steps or run some Gradle tasks. Prefer one-liners: avoid writing complicated initialization commands. npm run lint, npm run test:coverage...

Set release versions

You could simply use the git tag here for the version. You could also use automatic semver and tools such as commitizen to version the build. For private builds, X.Y.BUILD_NUMBER is enough. There is a Bitrise step for both iOS and Android.

Run iOS build

Run and create an archive, use the export method determined by the first step(s).

Conditional step, deploy to the app store.

The previous CI steps should result in a flag (ENV) to determine if we should deploy or not, and should we deploy all the way to production or just to Testflight.

Download Android upload signing keystore. 

The keystore should be stored in some secure location. You can use the Bitrise predefined step for this and upload the keystore to Bitrise.

Build Android

Similar to the iOS step

Conditional step, deploy to Play store

Yes, we can end up in a situation where the iOS app is in the app store, and the Android app does not build and does not end up in the store. In case of fire, do manual steps :/

Run codecov / deepcode.ai / whatever

Some extra static analysis for your code

Upload and trigger Device farm tests

Can be done for both platforms or only one. Since the tests can take a while, this step is not blocking. Use some other tool to check the test results from the Device farm. If you release from this CI pipeline to production, this pipeline setup does not work since you would need to cancel the release if this step fails.

Send a slack message.

It can contain the release version, test/static analysis result links, and a download URL. You could send it only if the build fails to avoid spam.


The benefit of having only one pipeline is simplicity; we can see what is happening at one glance. We don't need to move artifacts around, and we guarantee that the configs and versions are the same for both apps. The downside is that in situations where we want to treat them separately, for example, release a fix for only for Android, we need to do some tricks to run only the iOS part of the pipeline.  Automating the release to production with screenshots and release notes would also require some shuffling of the steps. You would, in that case, want to run the device tests before the store upload.

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