How to deploy arbitrary resources for React Native with CodePush

Question

I'm using CodePush to deploy the js bundle and a couple of resources to my react-native iOS app. Instead of using the react-native bundler to collect all the static images from my project I have a build step that just copies a folder called "static" into release/assets. But beside the "static" folder I als have other folders in release/assets that contain images and videos wich are use dynamically in the app via uri (e.g. { uri: 'assets/images/myImage.jpg' }). When building the app in XCode I just include the assets folder in the package.

From the CodePush documentation I gather that deploying the release folder should update all my assets. But it doesn't.

I downloaded the xcappdata via XCode and there you can see, that CodePush downloaded everything and stored it in /Library/Application Support/CodePush/[id]/release. But it still doesn't show up in the app.

Any ideas? Do I misunderstand the functionality of CodePush?

Answer 1

As you've seen, when you release a directory to the CodePush server via the CLI, it will round trip the entire contents of it to end-user's devices when they perform an update check/synchronization. That said, just because a file is in that update doesn't mean it will be useable unfortunately.

The behavior that you're seeing is actually a limitation of the way that the Image component resolves URIs in React Native. If you use the assets system to specify the "source" property (via a require("image.png") call), it will look for that file relative to the currently running JS bundle. This is how CodePush allows updating images, because as long as our plugin places the "assets" folder next to the JS bundle file on disk, the <Image> component will naturally find them.

However, when you specify an object with a URI (as you're doing) as the value of the "source" property, the Image component looks for that file relative to the binary on disk, and therefore, it will never look for it where it was placed by CodePush when you update them.

Because of this, CodePush only supports updating images which are loading via the require syntax. I'll make sure to update our docs to clarify that. Apologies for the confusion!