Building apps using the turtle-cli

These steps only apply for building Android apps. MacOS is required to build standalone iOS apps.

Following this walkthrough you can always refer to the official turtle-cli documentation here.

1. Make sure you have Docker installed.
2. Get into the directory with your Dockerfile and run the docker build -t turtle . command. Note that during the installation of turtle-cli a few warnings my appear but simply ignore them and wait for the process to finish.
3. Get back to your project directory and run:

docker run --name <name_you_want_to_use_for_this_container> \
-v <path_to_your_project_repository>:/home/node/<repository_directory_name> \
-e EXPO_USERNAME=<your_expo_username> \
-e EXPO_PASSWORD=<your_expo_password> \
-it turtle

This will create and run a new container named 'turtle' with all packages and dependencies installed.

4. The container stops once we run the exit command in its bash console. To get back into it run:

docker start -i turtle

5. Get into your container and login to the expo-cli using:

expo login --username <your_username> --password <your_password>

6. If you don't have a Keystore generated for this app move to your project directory, run expo build:android and tell Expo to generate one for you.
7. Once you have a Keystore generated fetch it using expo fetch:android:keystore command, and save it safely. This will also create a *.jks file in the project repository.
8. Add EXPO_ANDROID_KEYSTORE_PASSWORD and EXPO_ANDROID_KEY_PASSWORD as your environment variables. You can easily do this by appending proper export commands to the end of the .bashrc file inside your running container like this.

echo "export EXPO_ANDROID_KEYSTORE_PASSWORD=<your_keystore_password>" >> ~/.bashrc 
echo "export EXPO_ANDROID_KEY_PASSWORD=<your_key_password>" >> ~..bashrc 

9. Reload the .bashrc file with the source ~/.bashrc command. In case you added incorrect values to the .bashrc file simply edit it and re-run the source ~/.bashrc command.
10. Now we're ready to build the app. Move to your app directory inside the docker container and first run:

expo publish

And then run:

turtle build:android \
--keystore-path /home/node/<your_app_dir_name>/<your_app_dir_name>.jks \
--keystore-alias <your_key_alias> -t apk

To get the output file in the .aab format simply omit the -t apk argument. 11. The whole process takes a few minutes. Once it finishes you can find the generated file in the ~/expo-apps directory. To get it out of the container we can move it to our app directory with:

mv ~/expo-apps/<your_file_name>.aab ~/alert_app/

If you have any questions or have spotted any bugs let me know.