Releasing Updates

Once your app has been configured to query for updates against the CodePush server, you can begin releasing updates to it. In order to provide both simplicity and flexibility, the CodePush CLI includes two different commands for releasing updates:

1. General - Releases an update to the CodePush server that was generated by an external tool or build script (e.g. a Gulp task, the react-native bundle command). This provides the most flexibility in terms of fitting into existing workflows, since it strictly deals with CodePush-specific step, and leaves the app-specific compilation process to you.

2. React Native - Performs the same functionality as the general release command, but also handles the task of generating the updated app contents for you (JS bundle and assets), instead of requiring you to run both react-native bundle and then revopush release.

Which of these commands you should use is mostly a matter of requirements and/or preference. However, we generally recommend using the platform-specific command to start (since it greatly simplifies the experience), and then leverage the general-purpose release command if/when greater control is needed.

General

revopush release <appName> <updateContents> <targetBinaryVersion>
[--deploymentName <deploymentName>]
[--description <description>]
[--disabled <disabled>]
[--mandatory]
[--noDuplicateReleaseError]
[--rollout <rolloutPercentage>]

App name parameter

This specifies the name of the CodePush app that this update is being released for. This value corresponds to the friendly name that you specified when originally calling revopush app add (e.g. "MyApp-Android"). If you need to look it up, you can run the revopush app ls command to see your list of apps.

Update contents parameter

This specifies the location of the updated app code and assets you want to release. You can provide either a single file (e.g. a JS bundle for a React Native app), or a path to a directory. Note that you don't need to ZIP up multiple files or directories in order to deploy those changes, since the CLI will automatically ZIP them for you.

It's important that the path you specify refers to the platform-specific, prepared/bundled version of your app. The following table outlines which command you should run before releasing, as well as the location you can subsequently refer to using the updateContents parameter:

Platform	Prepare command	Package path (relative to project root)
React Native wo/assets (Android)	react-native bundle --platform android --entry-file <entryFile> --bundle-output <bundleOutput> --dev false	Value of the --bundle-output option
React Native w/assets (Android)	react-native bundle --platform android --entry-file <entryFile> --bundle-output <releaseFolder>/<bundleOutput> --assets-dest <releaseFolder> --dev false	Value of the --assets-dest option, which should represent a newly created directory that includes your assets and JS bundle
React Native wo/assets (iOS)	react-native bundle --platform ios --entry-file <entryFile> --bundle-output <bundleOutput> --dev false	Value of the --bundle-output option
React Native w/assets (iOS)	react-native bundle --platform ios --entry-file <entryFile> --bundle-output <releaseFolder>/<bundleOutput> --assets-dest <releaseFolder> --dev false	Value of the --assets-dest option, which should represent a newly created directory that includes your assets and JS bundle

Target binary version parameter

This specifies the store/binary version of the application you are releasing the update for, so that only users running that version will receive the update, while users running an older and/or newer version of the app binary will not. This is useful for the following reasons:

1. If a user is running an older binary version, it's possible that there are breaking changes in the CodePush update that wouldn't be compatible with what they're running.

2. If a user is running a newer binary version, then it's presumed that what they are running is newer (and potentially incompatible) with the CodePush update.

If you ever want an update to target multiple versions of the app store binary, we also allow you to specify the parameter as a semver range expression. That way, any client device running a version of the binary that satisfies the range expression (i.e. semver.satisfies(version, range) returns true) will get the update. Examples of valid semver range expressions are as follows:

Range Expression	Who gets the update
1.2.3	Only devices running the specific binary app store version 1.2.3 of your app
*	Any device configured to consume updates from your CodePush app
1.2.x	Devices running major version 1, minor version 2 and any patch version of your app
1.2.3 - 1.2.7	Devices running any binary version between 1.2.3 (inclusive) and 1.2.7 (inclusive)
>=1.2.3 <1.2.7	Devices running any binary version between 1.2.3 (inclusive) and 1.2.7 (exclusive)
~1.2.3	Equivalent to >=1.2.3 <1.3.0
^1.2.3	Equivalent to >=1.2.3 <2.0.0

_NOTE: If your semver expression starts with a special shell character or operator such as >, ^, or ** _, the command may not execute correctly if you do not wrap the value in quotes as the shell will not supply the right values to our CLI process. Therefore, it is best to wrap your targetBinaryVersion parameter in double quotes when calling the release command, e.g. revopush release MyApp-iOS updateContents ">1.2.3".*

NOTE: As defined in the semver spec, ranges only work for non pre-release versions: https://github.com/npm/node-semver#prerelease-tags. If you want to update a version with pre-release tags, then you need to write the exact version you want to update (1.2.3-beta for example).

The following table outlines the version value that CodePush expects your update's semver range to satisfy for each respective app type:

Platform	Source of app store version
React Native (Android)	The android.defaultConfig.versionName property in your build.gradle file
React Native (iOS)	The CFBundleShortVersionString key in the Info.plist file
React Native (Windows)	The <Identity Version> key in the Package.appxmanifest file

NOTE: If the app store version in the metadata files are missing a patch version, e.g. 2.0, it will be treated as having a patch version of 0, i.e. 2.0 -> 2.0.0.

Deployment name parameter

This specifies which deployment you want to release the update to. This defaults to Staging, but when you're ready to deploy to Production, or one of your own custom deployments, just explicitly set this argument.

NOTE: The parameter can be set using either "--deploymentName" or "-d".

Description parameter

This provides an optional "change log" for the deployment. The value is simply round tripped to the client so that when the update is detected, your app can choose to display it to the end-user (e.g. via a "What's new?" dialog). This string accepts control characters such as \n and \t so that you can include whitespace formatting within your descriptions for improved readability.

NOTE: This parameter can be set using either "--description" or "-des"

Disabled parameter

This specifies whether an update should be downloadable by end users or not. If left unspecified, the update will not be disabled (i.e. users will download it the moment your app calls sync). This parameter can be valuable if you want to release an update that isn't immediately available, until you explicitly patch it when you want end users to be able to download it (e.g. an announcement blog post went live).

NOTE: This parameter can be set using either "--disabled" or "-x"

Mandatory parameter

This specifies whether the update should be considered mandatory or not (e.g. it includes a critical security fix). This attribute is simply round tripped to the client, who can then decide if and how they would like to enforce it.

NOTE: This parameter is simply a "flag", and therefore, its absence indicates that the release is optional, and its presence indicates that it's mandatory. You can provide a value to it (e.g. --mandatory true), however, simply specifying --mandatory is sufficient for marking a release as mandatory.

The mandatory attribute is unique because the server will dynamically modify it as necessary in order to ensure that the semantics of your releases are maintained for your end-users. For example, imagine that you released the following three updates to your app:

Release	Mandatory?
v1	No
v2	Yes
v3	No

If an end-user is currently running v1, and they query the server for an update, it will respond with v3 (since that is the latest), but it will dynamically convert the release to mandatory, since a mandatory update was released in between. This behavior is important since the code contained in v3 is incremental to that included in v2, and therefore, whatever made v2 mandatory, continues to make v3 mandatory for anyone that didn't already acquire v2.

If an end-user is currently running v2, and they query the server for an update, it will respond with v3, but leave the release as optional. This is because they already received the mandatory update, and therefore, there isn't a need to modify the policy of v3. This behavior is why we say that the server will "dynamically convert" the mandatory flag, because as far as the release goes, its mandatory attribute will always be stored using the value you specified when releasing it. It is only changed on-the-fly as necessary when responding to an update check from an end-user.

If you never release an update that is marked as mandatory, then the above behavior doesn't apply to you, since the server will never change an optional release to mandatory unless there were intermingled mandatory updates as illustrated above. Additionally, if a release is marked as mandatory, it will never be converted to optional, since that wouldn't make any sense. The server will only change an optional release to mandatory in order to respect the semantics described above.

NOTE: This parameter can be set using either --mandatory or -m

No duplicate release error parameter

This specifies that if the update is identical to the latest release on the deployment, the CLI should generate a warning instead of an error. This is useful for continuous integration scenarios where it is expected that small modifications may trigger releases where no production code has changed.

Rollout parameter

IMPORTANT: In order for this parameter to actually take affect, your end users need to be running version 1.9.0-beta+ (for React Native) of the CodePush plugin. If you release an update that specifies a rollout property, no end user running an older version of React Native plugins will be eligible for the update. Therefore, until you have adopted the neccessary version of the platform-specific CodePush plugin (as previously mentioned), we would advise not setting a rollout value on your releases, since no one would end up receiving it.

This specifies the percentage of users (as an integer between 1 and 100) that should be eligible to receive this update. It can be helpful if you want to "flight" new releases with a portion of your audience (e.g. 25%), and get feedback and/or watch for exceptions/crashes, before making it broadly available for everyone. If this parameter isn't set, it is set to 100%, and therefore, you only need to set it if you want to actually limit how many users will receive it.

When leveraging the rollout capability, there are a few additional considerations to keep in mind:

1. You cannot release a new update to a deployment whose latest release is an "active" rollout (i.e. its rollout property is non-null). The rollout needs to be "completed" (i.e. setting the rollout property to 100) before you can release further updates to the deployment.

2. If you rollback a deployment whose latest release is an "active" rollout, the rollout value will be cleared, effectively "deactivating" the rollout behavior

3. Unlike the mandatory and description fields, when you promote a release from one deployment to another, it will not propagate the rollout property, and therefore, if you want the new release (in the target deployment) to have a rollout value, you need to explicitly set it when you call the promote command.

NOTE: This parameter can be set using either --rollout or -r

React Native

revopush release-react <appName> <platform>
[--bundleName <bundleName>]
[--deploymentName <deploymentName>]
[--description <description>]
[--development <development>]
[--disabled <disabled>]
[--entryFile <entryFile>]
[--gradleFile <gradleFile>]
[--mandatory]
[--noDuplicateReleaseError]
[--outputDir <outputDir>]
[--plistFile <plistFile>]
[--plistFilePrefix <plistFilePrefix>]
[--sourcemapOutput <sourcemapOutput>]
[--targetBinaryVersion <targetBinaryVersion>]
[--rollout <rolloutPercentage>]
[--useHermes <useHermes>]
[--podFile <podFile>]
[--extraHermesFlags <extraHermesFlags>]
[--privateKeyPath <privateKeyPath>]
[--xcodeProjectFile <xcodeProjectFile>]
[--xcodeTargetName <xcodeTargetName>]
[--buildConfigurationName <buildConfigurationName>]

The release-react command is a React Native-specific version of the "vanilla" release command, which supports all of the same parameters (e.g. --mandatory, --description), yet simplifies the process of releasing updates by performing the following additional behavior:

1. Running the react-native bundle command in order to generate the update contents (JS bundle and assets) that will be released to the CodePush server. It uses sensible defaults as much as possible (e.g. creating a non-dev build, assuming an iOS entry file is named index.ios.js), but also exposes the relevant react-native bundle parameters to enable flexibility (e.g. --sourcemapOutput).

2. Inferring the targetBinaryVersion of this release by using the version name that is specified in your project's Info.plist (for iOS) and build.gradle (for Android) files.

To illustrate the difference that the release-react command can make, the following is an example of how you might generate and release an update for a React Native app using the "vanilla" release command:

mkdir ./CodePush

react-native bundle --platform ios \
--entry-file index.ios.js \
--bundle-output ./CodePush/main.jsbundle \
--assets-dest ./CodePush \
--dev false

revopush release MyApp-iOS ./CodePush 1.0.0

Achieving the equivalent behavior with the release-react command would simply require the following command, which is generally less error-prone:

revopush release-react MyApp-iOS ios

App name parameter

This is the same parameter as the one described in the above section.

Platform parameter

This specifies which platform the current update is targeting, and can be either android, ios or windows (case-insensitive). This value is only used to determine how to properly bundle your update contents and isn't actually sent to the server.

Deployment name parameter

This is the same parameter as the one described in the above section.

Description parameter

This is the same parameter as the one described in the above section.

Mandatory parameter

This is the same parameter as the one described in the above section.

No duplicate release error parameter

This is the same parameter as the one described in the above section.

Rollout parameter

This is the same parameter as the one described in the above section. If left unspecified, the release will be made available to all users.

Target binary version parameter

This is the same parameter as the one described in the above section. If left unspecified, this defaults to targeting the exact version specified in the app's Info.plist (for iOS) and build.gradle (for Android) files.

Bundle name parameter

This specifies the file name that should be used for the generated JS bundle. If left unspecified, the standard bundle name will be used for the specified platform: main.jsbundle (iOS), index.android.bundle (Android) and index.windows.bundle (Windows).

NOTE: This parameter can be set using either --bundleName or -b

Development parameter

This specifies whether to generate a unminified, development JS bundle. If left unspecified, this defaults to false where warnings are disabled and the bundle is minified.

NOTE: This parameter can be set using either --development or --dev

Disabled parameter

This is the same parameter as the one described in the above section.

Entry file parameter

This specifies the relative path to the app's root/entry JavaScript file. If left unspecified, this defaults to index.ios.js (for iOS), index.android.js (for Android) or index.windows.bundle (for Windows) if that file exists, or index.js otherwise.

NOTE: This parameter can be set using either --entryFile or -e

Gradle file parameter (Android only)

This specifies the relative path to the build.gradle file that the CLI should use when attempting to auto-detect the target binary version for the release. This parameter is only meant for advanced scenarios, since the CLI will automatically be able to find your build.grade file in "standard" React Native projects. However, if your gradle file is located in an arbitrary location, that the CLI can't discover, then using this parameter allows you to continue releasing CodePush updates, without needing to explicitly set the --targetBinaryVersion parameter. Since build.gradle is a required file name, specifying the path to the containing folder or the full path to the file itself will both achieve the same effect.

revopush release-react MyApp-Android android -p "./foo/bar/"
revopush release-react MyApp-Android android -p "./foo/bar/build.gradle"

Plist file parameter (iOS only)

This specifies the relative path to the Info.plist file that the CLI should use when attempting to auto-detect the target binary version for the release. This parameter is only meant for advanced scenarios, since the CLI will automatically be able to find your Info.plist file in "standard" React Native projects, and you can use the --plistFilePrefix parameter in order to support per-environment plist files (e.g. STAGING-Info.plist). However, if your plist is located in an arbitrary location, that the CLI can't discover, then using this parameter allows you to continue releasing CodePush updates, without needing to explicitly set the --targetBinaryVersion parameter.

revopush release-react MyApp-iOS ios -p "./foo/bar/MyFile.plist"

NOTE: This parameter can be set using either --plistFile or -p

Plist file prefix parameter (iOS only)

This specifies the file name prefix of the Info.plist file that that CLI should use when attempting to auto-detect the target binary version for the release. This can be useful if you've created per-environment plist files (e.g. DEV-Info.plist, STAGING-Info.plist), and you want to be able to release CodePush updates without needing to explicitly set the --targetBinaryVersion parameter. By specifying a --plistFilePrefx, the CLI will look for a file named <prefix>-Info.plist, instead of simply Info.plist (which is the default behavior), in the following locations: ./ios and ./ios/<appName>. If your plist file isn't located in either of those directories (e.g. your app is a native iOS app with embedded RN views), or uses an entirely different file naming convention, then consider using the --plistFile parameter.

# Auto-detect the target binary version of this release by looking up the
# app version within the STAGING-Info.plist file in either the ./ios or ./ios/<APP> directories.
revopush release-react MyApp-iOS ios --pre "STAGING"

# Tell the CLI to use your dev plist (`DEV-Info.plist`).
# Note that the hyphen separator can be explicitly stated.
revopush release-react MyApp-iOS ios --pre "DEV-"

NOTE: This parameter can be set using either --plistFilePrefix or --pre

Sourcemap output parameter

This specifies the relative path to where the generated JS bundle's sourcemap file should be written. If left unspecified, sourcemaps will not be generated.

NOTE: This parameter can be set using either --sourcemapOutput or -s

Output directory parameter

This specifies the relative path to where the assets, JS bundle and sourcemap files should be written. If left unspecified, the assets, JS bundle and sourcemap will be copied to the /tmp/CodePush folder.

NOTE: This parameter can be set using either --outputDir or -o

Use Hermes parameter

This parameter enforces the use of the Hermes compiler. If not specified, the automatic checks will be performed, inspecting the build.gradle and Podfile for the Hermes flag.

NOTE: This parameter can be set using either --hermesEnabled or -h

Podfile parameter (iOS only)

The Podfile path will be used for Hermes automatic check. Not used if --useHermes is specified.

NOTE: This parameter can be set using either --podfile or -pod

Extra hermes flags parameter

Hermes flags which will be passed to Hermes compiler.

NOTE: This parameter can be set using either --extraHermesFlags or -hf

Private key path parameter

Private key path which is used for code signing.

NOTE: This parameter can be set using either --privateKeyPath or -k

Xcode project file parameter

Path to the Xcode project or project.pbxproj file.

NOTE: This parameter can be set using either --xcodeProjectFile or -xp

Xcode target name parameter

Name of target (PBXNativeTarget) which specifies the binary version you want to target this release at (iOS only).

NOTE: This parameter can be set using either --xcodeTargetName or -xt

Build configuration name parameter

Name of build configuration which specifies the binary version you want to target this release at. For example, 'Debug' or 'Release' (iOS only).

NOTE: This parameter can be set using either --buildConfigurationName or -c