Doing automated Git Flow branch deploys on their own Expo release channels with Bitbucket Pipelines

publishing every git flow branch to its own expo release channel from bitbucket pipelines, using sed to swap the / that expo rejects

background

• I have an Expo based React Native app that i publish with expo publish
• I follow git flow branch naming and structure
• I gave multiple people working on plenty of features that we need to test separately

what i want

Publish every branch to it’s own release channel automatically

the issue

Because i’m using Git Flow, the branch naming is feature/my-awesome-branch. I can get the branch name with a built-in pipeline variable, but the / after feature doesn’t work with Expo release channel naming. You can’t have a / in a release channel name..

[06:23:47] Release channel name can only contain lowercase letters, numbers and special characters . _ and -

the solution

• Get the branch name with ${BITBUCKET_BRANCH}, do some sed magic to remove / in the name, and voila!

the code

 1feature/*:
 2  - step:
 3      name: Publish to Expo
 4      deployment: feature
 5      caches:
 6        - npm
 7      script:
 8        - unset NPM_CONFIG_USER
 9        - npm ci
10        - npm install -g --unsafe-perm expo-cli
11        - expo login -u ${EXPO_USERNAME} -p ${EXPO_PASSWORD}
12        - RELEASE_CHANNEL_FEATURE=$(echo ${BITBUCKET_BRANCH} | sed 's|feature/|feature_|')
13        - expo publish --clear --release-channel ${RELEASE_CHANNEL_FEATURE} # RELEASE_CHANNEL is a based on branch name (feature/my-feature => feature_my-feature)