Experimental support for CNG and Expo Config Plugins

[thymikee]

Summary

Experimental support for Continuous Native Generation (CNG) and Expo Config Plugins, based on an approach adopted from RNTA.

Expo Config Plugins are great and the ecosystem is huge. By supporting the patterns already defined by them, most libraries that provide Expo Config Plugins should work out of the box, with the exception of the ones that use dangerous mods (since these depend on specific lines of code that might be different in our templates).

That means that apps will be able to use app.json keys in the same convention already defined by Expo, as well as the plugins array for third-party libraries.

What's nice is that this setup doesn't require expo installed and we can use config plugins to modify our own templates, which opens path to CNG and prebuilds.

This PR adds 2 new commands:

• rock apply-config-plugins: reads app.json keys and applies both internal Expo Config Plugins as well as third-party libraries (app.config.ts not yet supported)
• rock prebuild: deletes and regenerates the native iOS and Android directories, and then applies config plugins

Test plan

In pluginExpoConfigPlugins.test.ts, we've added tests for most of Expo's default iOS and Android config plugins (e.g. name, ios.bundleIdentifier, android.package, etc) and they work well, but there's still improvements to be made to the test suite in order to guarantee more reliability.

The automated test suite uses the new test app at apps/expo-config-plugins-test-app, copies to a TMP dir, runs the Expo Config Plugins modifiers, and check for the expected changes in the template.

To test manually:

1. Create new Rock project: pnpm create rock@latest
2. Add @expo/config-plugins to sample project dependencies
3. Add pluginExpoConfigPlugins() to rnef.config.js:

import { pluginExpoConfigPlugins } from '@rock-js/plugin-expo-config-plugins';

export default {
  plugins: [pluginExpoConfigPlugins()],
  ...
};

4. Create an app.json file and add properties
5. Run rock prebuild to regen native dirs and apply plugins or rock apply-config-plugins to apply config plugins directly without regenerating directories

---

Note

Add apps/* to pnpm-workspace.yaml and introduce TS path mapping for @rock-js/plugin-expo-config-plugins.

• Monorepo:
  • Update pnpm-workspace.yaml to include apps/*.
• TypeScript:
  • Add path alias for @rock-js/plugin-expo-config-plugins in tsconfig.base.json.

^{Written by Cursor Bugbot for commit 860dfd5. This will update automatically on new commits. Configure here.}

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2 Skipped Deployments

Project	Deployment	Preview	Comments	Updated (UTC)
rnef	Ignored	Preview		Sep 28, 2025 9:47pm
rock	Ignored	Preview		Sep 28, 2025 9:47pm

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[andriyslyusar]

Really awesome framework @thiagobrez. Do we have any estimate on when this changes would be released? The CNG support is the one of major thing holding from introducing the Rock.

[thiagobrez]

Thanks @andriyslyusar! No estimate yet, but soon enough :D