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Expo Documentation

This is the public documentation for Expo, its SDK, client, and services.

You can access this documentation online at https://docs.expo.dev/. It's built using Next.js on top of the https://github.com/vercel/docs codebase.

Contributors: Please make sure that you edit the docs in the pages/versions/unversioned directory if you want your changes to apply to the next SDK version too!

Running Locally

Download the copy of this repository.

git clone https://github.com/expo/expo.git

Then cd into the docs directory and install dependencies with:

yarn

Then you can run the app with (make sure you have no server running on port 3002):

yarn run dev

Now the documentation is running at http://localhost:3002, and any changes you make to markdown or JavaScript files will automatically trigger reloads.

To run locally in production mode

yarn run export
yarn run export-server

Editing Docs Content

You can find the content source of the documentation inside the pages/ directory. Documentation is mostly written in markdown with the help of some React components (for Snack embeds, etc). Our API documentation can all be found under pages/versions/; we keep separate versions of the documentation for each SDK version currently supported in Expo Go, see "A note about versioning" for more info. The routes and navbar are automatically inferred from the directory structure within versions.

Note: We are currently in the process of moving our API documenation to being auto-generated using expotools's GenerateDocsAPIData command.

Each markdown page can be provided metadata in the heading, distinguished by:

---
metadata: goes here
---

These metadata items include:

  • title: Title of the page shown as the heading and in search results
  • hideFromSearch: Whether to hide the page from Algolia search results. Defaults to false.
  • hideInSidebar: Whether to hide this page from the sidebar. Defaults to false.
  • hideTOC: Whether to hide the table of contents (appears on the right sidebar). Defaults to false.
  • sidebarTitle: The title of the page to display in the sidebar. Defaults to the page title.

Editing Code

The docs are written with Next.js and TypeScript. If you need to make code changes, follow steps from the Running locally section, then open a separate terminal and run the TypeScript compiler in watch mode - it will watch your code changes and notify you about errors.

yarn watch

When you are done, you should run prettier to format your code. Also, don't forget to run tests and linter before committing your changes.

yarn prettier
yarn test
yarn lint

Redirects

Server-side redirects

These redirects are limited in their expressiveness - you can map a path to another path, but no regular expressions or anything are supported. See client-side redirects for more of that. Server-side redirects are re-created on each run of deploy.sh.

We currently do two client-side redirects, using meta tags with http-equiv="refresh":

  • / -> /versions/latest/
  • /versions -> /versions/latest

This method is not great for accessibility and should be avoided where possible.

Client-side redirects

Use these for more complex rules than one-to-one path-to-path redirect mapping. For example, we use client-side redirects to strip the .html extension off, and to identify if the request is for a version of the documentation that we no longer support.

You can add your own client-side redirect rules in common/error-utilities.ts.

Algolia Docsearch

We use Algolia Docsearch as the search engine for our docs. Right now, it's searching for any keywords with the proper version tag based on the current location. This is set in the components/DocumentationPage header.

In components/plugins/AlgoliaSearch, you can see the facetFilters set to [['version:none', 'version:{currentVersion}']]. Translated to English, this means "Search on all pages where version is none, or the currently selected version.".

  • All unversioned pages use the version tag none.
  • All versioned pages use the SDK version (e.g. v40.0.0 or v39.0.0).
  • All hideFromSearch: true pages don't have the version tag.

Quirks

  • You can't have curly brace without quotes: `{}` -> {}
  • Make sure to leave an empty newline between a table and following content

A note about versioning

Expo's SDK is versioned so that apps made on old SDKs are still supported when new SDKs are released. The website documents previous SDK versions too.

Version names correspond to directory names under versions.

unversioned is a special version for the next SDK release. It is not included in production output. Additionally, any versions greater than the package.json version number are not included in production output, so that it's possible to generate, test, and make changes to new SDK version docs during the release process.

latest is an untracked folder which duplicates the contents of the folder matching the version number in package.json.

Sometimes you want to make an edit in version X and have that edit also be applied in versions Y, Z, ... (say, when you're fixing documentation for an API call that existed in old versions too). You can use the ./scripts/versionpatch.sh utility to apply your git diff in one version in other versions. For example, to update the docs in unversioned then apply it on v8.0.0 and v7.0.0, you'd do the following after editing the docs in unversioned such that it shows up in git diff:

./scripts/versionpatch.sh unversioned v8.0.0 v7.0.0

Any changes in your git diff outside the unversioned directory are ignored so don't worry if you have code changes or such elsewhere.

Deployment

The docs are deployed automatically via a GitHub Action each time a PR with docs changes is merged to main.

How-tos

Internal linking

If you need to link from one MDX file to another, please use the path-reference to this file including extension. This allows us to automatically validate these links and see if the file and/or headers still exists.

  • from: tutorial/button.md, to: /workflow/guides/ -> ../workflow/guides.md
  • from: index.md, to: /guides/errors/#tracking-js-errors -> ./guides/errors.md#tracking-js-errors (or without ./)

You can validate all current links by running yarn lint-links.

Updating latest version of docs

When we release a new SDK, we copy the unversioned directory, and rename it to the new version. Latest version of docs is read from package.json so make sure to update the version key there as well. However, if you update the version key there, you need to rm -rf node_modules/.cache/ before the change is picked up (why? read this).

Make sure to also grab the upgrade instructions from the release notes blog post and put them in upgrading-expo-sdk-walkthrough.md.

That's all you need to do. The versions directory is listed on server start to find all available versions. The routes and navbar contents are automatically inferred from the directory structure within versions.

Because the navbar is automatically generated from the directory structure, the default ordering of the links under each section is alphabetical. However, for many sections, this is not ideal UX. So, if you wish to override the alphabetical ordering, manipulate page titles in navigation.js.

Syncing app.json / app.config.js with the schema

To render the app.json / app.config.js properties table, we currently store a local copy of the appropriate version of the schema.

If the schema is updated, in order to sync and rewrite our local copy, run yarn run schema-sync <SDK version integer> or yarn run schema-sync unversioned.

Importing from the React Native docs

You can import the React Native docs in an automated way into these docs.

  1. Update the react-native-website submodule here
  2. yarn run import-react-native-docs

This will write all the relevant RN doc stuff into the unversioned version directory. You may need to tweak the script as the source docs change; the script hackily translates between the different forms of markdown that have different quirks.

The React Native docs are actually versioned but we currently read off of main.

Adding Images and Assets

You can add images and assets to the public/static directory. They'll be served by the production and staging servers at /static.

Adding videos

  • Record the video using QuickTime
  • Install ffmpeg (brew install ffmpeg)
  • Run ffmpeg -i your-video-name.mov -vcodec h264 -acodec mp2 your-video-name.mp4 to convert to mp4.
  • If the width of the video is larger than ~1200px, then run this to shrink it: ffmpeg -i your-video.mp4 -filter:v scale="1280:trunc(ow/a/2)*2" your-video-smaller.mp4
  • Put the video in the appropriate location in public/static/videos and use it in your docs page MDX like this:
import Video from '~/components/plugins/Video';

// Change the path to point to the relative path to your video from within the `static/videos` directory
<Video file="guides/color-schemes.mp4" />;

Inline Snack examples

Snacks are a great way to add instantly-runnable examples to our docs. The SnackInline component can be imported to any markdown file, and used like this:

import SnackInline from '~/components/plugins/SnackInline';

<SnackInline label='My Example Label' dependencies={['array of', 'packages', 'this Snack relies on']}>

// All your JavaScript code goes in here

// You can use:
/* @info Some text goes here */
  const myVariable = SomeCodeThatDoesStuff();
/* @end */
// to create hoverable-text, which reveals the text inside of `@info` onHover.

// You can use:
/* @hide Content that is still shown, like a preview. */
  Everything in here is hidden in the example Snack until
  you open it in snack.expo.dev
/* @end */
// to shorten the length of the Snack shown in our docs. Common example are hiding useless code in examples, like StyleSheets

</SnackInline>

Embedding multiple options of code

Sometimes it's useful to show multiple ways of doing something, for instance maybe you'd like to have an example using a React class component, and also an example of a functional component. The Tabs plugin is really useful for this, and this is how you'd use it an a markdown file:

import { Tab, Tabs } from '~/components/plugins/Tabs';

<Tabs>
<Tab label="Add 1 One Way">

    addOne = async x => {
    /* @info This text will be shown onHover */
    return x + 1;
    /* @end */
    };


</Tab>
<Tab label="Add 1 Another Way">


    addOne = async x => {
    /* @info This text will be shown onHover */
    return x++;
    /* @end */
    };

</Tab>
</Tabs>

n.b. The components should not be indented or they will not be parsed correctly.

Excluding pages from Docsearch

To ignore a page from the search result, use hideFromSearch: true on that page. This removes the <meta name="docsearch:version"> tag from that page and filters it from our facet-based search.

Please note that hideFromSearch only prevents the page from showing up in the internal docs search (Algolia). The page will still show up in search engine results like Google. For a page to be hidden even from search engine results, you need to edit the sitemap that is generated via our Next.js config (config.js).

Excluding directories from the sidebar

Certain directories are excluded from the sidebar in order to prevent it from getting too long and unnavigable. You can find a list of these directories, and add new ones, in navigation.js under hiddenSections.

If you just want to hide a single page from the sidebar, set hideInSidebar: true in the page metadata.

Prettier

Please commit any sizeable diffs that are the result of prettier separately to make reviews as easy as possible.

If you have a codeblock using /* @info */ highlighting, use <!-- prettier-ignore --> on the block and take care to preview the block in the browser to ensure that the indentation is correct - the highlighting annotation will sometimes swallow newlines.

TODOs:

  • Handle image sizing in imports better
  • Read from the appropriate version (configurable) of the React Native docs, not just main
  • Make Snack embeds work; these are marked in some of the React Native docs but they are just imported as plain JS code blocks