Walmart labs has today launched Electrode Over The Air (Electrode OTA hence forth), an independent application that will manage your bundles, and is compatible with the Microsoft Code Push Client.
Now you can use a 100% open source solution for enabling your React Native OTA updates, with Code Push on the client side and Electrode RN OTA on the back end.
With Electrode OTA Server, you can host, manage, and monitor your JavaScript bundles on your own server, so you’re in control of access and security. With a small adjustment to your Code Push Client application, pointing it to your own server instead of Microsoft’s, you can seamlessly deploy React Native bundles to client apps running on iOS and Android.
It takes a strong CI system to smoothly manage cross-platform apps. Because Electrode OTA Server is open source, you’re free to modify and adjust its behavior to suit the needs of your application, and its pluggable architecture (based on our own Electrode Server infrastructure) means the community can extend its capabilities into areas we haven’t thought of yet.
Deploying and updating your app is only half the battle, so we also built in the ability to query the Cassandra backend for advanced heuristics to give your data team plenty to analyze. You’ll get insight into questions like when to update, how effective your last update was, and more.
We didn’t stop there. We also developed Electrode OTA Desktop, a cross-platform Electron-based application (that’s right, Electrode on Electron) to ease the management of multiple deployment environments.
Electrode OTA gives you complete control of rollout plans, and rollback in case of a misadventure in configuration management — because any rollout without a rollback plan is just tempting the deployment gods.
All of this is just the first step in our plans for the React Native ecosystem. We appreciate all the work the community has put into Code Push, and hope this contribution helps express our commitment to giving back.
“When companies embrace open source, everyone wins; the community gets a collection of production-ready tools that have already been tested and hardened, and the community of developers on GitHub can further refine and grow the tools,” said Brandon Keepers, Head of Open Source, GitHub. “By publishing Electrode OTA on GitHub, @WalmartLabs is helping further innovation for the React Native platform and increasing standardization of the technology in its stack.”
