Easy Versioning of Expo App

⚠️ DISCLAIMER
I am not saying that this is the standard nor that this is the best practice. I introduce this because I think it is 'handy' for me. Also, please note that there already might be a workflow better than this.

Motivations

I want to do the followings with an effort as little as possible:

• Avoid version collision between the installed app and a newly built app in production (for test)
• Exploit the existing commands or scripts for versioning

TL;DR

Here is my app.config.js:

+import { readFileSync } from "fs";

+const { version } = JSON.parse(readFileSync("./package.json"), "utf8");
+const [major, minor] = version.split(".").map(Number);

+const now = new Date();
+const year = now.getFullYear().toString().padStart(4, "0");
+const month = (now.getMonth() + 1).toString().padStart(2, "0");
+const day = now.getDate().toString().padStart(2, "0");
+const hour = now.getHours().toString().padStart(2, "0");
+const minute = now.getMinutes().toString().padStart(2, "0");

export default {
  expo {
-    version: "1.0.0",
+    version: `${major}.${minor}.${year}${month}${day}${hour}${minute}`,
  }
}

Explanation

PATCH version (${year}...${minute})

Whenever I run expo prebuild, app version is refreshed and PATCH version is set to the date/time of prebuilding. Thus, it will never raise version collision with the already installed app.

MAJOR, MINOR version

I pulled MAJOR and MINOR versions from package.json. This enables me to reuse the npm version. By running npm version major and npm version minor, MAJOR and MINOR versions of package.json get updated and so does app's version.