How do you build a complete CI/CD pipeline for React Native projects with GitHub Actions?

Short answer

Create a workflow that checks code quality and static analysis (lint, typecheck, unit tests), then invokes EAS CLI or Gradle/Fastlane to build and distribute packages automatically when changes are merged into the main branch.

Explanation

CI/CD ensures that code that breaks the native build is not merged. The pipeline includes installing dependencies with caching, running Jest tests, validating TypeScript, then calling eas-cli with an EXPO_TOKEN to build production packages and upload them automatically to app stores.

Code example

name: CI/CD Pipeline
on:
  push:
    branches: [main]

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with: { node-version: 20, cache: 'npm' }
      - run: npm ci
      - run: npm run lint
      - run: npm test

  build:
    needs: test
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: expo/expo-github-action@v8
        with:
          eas-version: latest
          token: ${{ secrets.EXPO_TOKEN }}
      - run: eas build --platform all --profile production --non-interactive

Common mistakes

• Trying to build native iOS projects on Ubuntu GitHub Actions runners instead of macos-runner hosts or using cloud EAS.

Follow-up questions

• How do you securely store sensitive tokens and secrets using Keychain (iOS) and Keystore (Android)?

Sources

• Expo docs — EAS Workflows