using plugin with Expo react native app

[krunalc]

I have very general question. Will this plugin work with react native application developed using Expo?

[christocracy]

Yes, if you "eject" your app (or however they refer to it now.

[krunalc]

ohh... thanks for prompt response. It's big decision and will give a thought to it.

[mikehardy]

@christocracy this may be of interest to you - there's a new "config plugins" system from Expo to "customize" a "managed workflow" app. Use of the same was just contributed to react-native-firebase in invertase/react-native-firebase#5480 - for this module and for geolocation, it may be of interest in that it could broaden the potential userbase of the plugins significantly given that Expo has a large share of the react-native market.

@krunalc - for the avoidance of doubt, nothing I just wrote above would allow this to be used by a non-ejected Expo app right now, it does not alter the answer from Chris.

[barthap]

Let me explain more:

• As it was said before - this will work with Bare Workflow - in "ejected" app
• This will not work in the "Expo Go" app - you have to rely on expo-background-fetch there
• If you do not want to opt-out of Managed Workflow, you can build a custom Development Client with react-native-background-fetch (or any custom native library) included. You can read more here.
• Config plugins' purpose is to automatically apply native installation steps, so you don't have to touch Android Studio/Xcode stuff, the expo prebuild / expo run commands take care of everything for you. The config plugin for react-native-background-fetch seems not to exist yet. But if you want to develop your own - start by reading the config plugins guide, you can take inspiration from expo-background-fetch plugin source code.

[azizsaad]

As per the docs, we can now add "react-native-background-fetch" to the plugins in our Expo config file.

Does this mean this package should work in managed workflow?

[christocracy]

See the README "Installing the plugin".

[azizsaad]

Yep, I followed the instructions

• ran npx expo install react-native-background-fetch
• this is the relevant part of my app.config.js file:

 ios: {
      supportsTablet: true,
      infoPlist: {
        UIBackgroundModes: ["fetch", "processing"],
        BGTaskSchedulerPermittedIdentifiers: ["com.transistorsoft.fetch"],
      },
      usesAppleSignIn: true,
    },

but still encountered the following error:

This is a managed app, just for an iOS application btw, not Android.

[azizsaad]

and there's no mention of bare/managed Expo workflows in that README?

[christocracy]

This issue is closed. Post a new issue.

[azizsaad]

This issue is closed. Post a new issue.

Yep, will do 👍 - thanks!