Getting started with the Totara Mobile app

Overview

This page outlines the basic steps to get the Totara Mobile app running in your local development environment. This documentation is aimed at someone with a basic understanding of mobile development, at a minimum.

If you are considering customising the Totara App, we suggest you finish reading this page, then see more on App customisation.

The Totara Mobile app is built with React Native using Expo and Expo Application Services (EAS). You will need to set up an account with Expo.

You can set up an EAS account to help manage things like cloud builds, end to end testing, and more.

This guide assumes you are already familiar with setting up a mobile development environment and have used React Native before. If you need to set up from scratch, follow Expo's guide on getting your environment sorted. We're also assuming you're using a Mac for development.

Local Development

App Requirements

NodeJS v20.x
npm v10.7.x
EAS CLI v12.4.x

Android Requirements

Java/JDK 17.0.10 (zulu17)
Android Studio
Android SDK 33
A Google Developer Account

iOS Requirements

Cocoapods 1.15.2
MacOS 13.6.x (Ventura)
Xcode 15.2
An Apple Developer Account

Other

Totara Learn >= 13 (needed only if you need to connect to Totara)

Code repository

Before setting up the git repository, please familiarise yourself with how to get SSH access to our repos.

Clone code

$ git clone ssh://git@code.totaralms.com/totara-mobile.git 
$ git checkout master

Install EAS tools

$ npm install -g eas-cli

Install dependencies

$ npm install

Important
The Totara app includes a dependency lets the app serve up static files for SCORM. This dependency includes extra install steps which will need to be followed.

Prepare Firebase configuration files

$ cp GoogleService-Info.example.plist GoogleService-Info.plist
$ cp google-services.example.json google-services.json

Run the app

# Generate all your native files
$ npm run prebuild 

# Run on iOS
$ npm run ios

# Or run on Android
$ npm run android

Cloud Builds in EAS

Requirements

Sign up for Expo.dev for automated builds (start with the Free plan)
Sign up for Appetize.io for browser-based simulator testing (Optional - start with a Free plan)

Expo Setup

You will need to set up a new project in Expo and fill in the fields in app.config.ts:

slug
name
version
projectId

You will also need to set up the following secrets in Expo:

GOOGLE_SERVICES_FILE_ANDROID
GOOGLE_SERVICES_FILE_IOS
SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL # (Optional - for Slack build notifications)
APPETIZE_API_KEY # (Optional - for Appetize testing)
APPETIZE_IOS_APP_PUBLIC_KEY # (Optional - for Appetize testing)
APPETIZE_ANDROID_APP_PUBLIC_KEY # (Optional - for Appetize testing)
SENTRY_AUTH_TOKEN
SENTRY_DSN
SENTRY_ORG
SENTRY_PROJECT

Starting a Build

To start a build in Expo using EAS

npx eas build --platform all --profile development

Troubleshooting

If you received an error as below:

✖ Prebuild failed
Error: [android.dangerous]: withAndroidDangerousBaseMod: Could not find MIME for Buffer <null>
Error: [android.dangerous]: withAndroidDangerousBaseMod: Could not find MIME for Buffer <null>
    at Jimp.parseBitmap (/home/expo/workingdir/build/node_modules/jimp-compact/dist/jimp.js:1:125518)
    at Jimp.parseBitmap (/home/expo/workingdir/build/node_modules/jimp-compact/dist/jimp.js:1:8514)
    at /home/expo/workingdir/build/node_modules/jimp-compact/dist/jimp.js:1:7613
    at FSReqCallback.readFileAfterClose [as oncomplete] (node:internal/fs/read_file_context:68:3)
npx expo prebuild --skip-dependency-update react --platform android exited with non-zero code: 1

This is a common one we see and as far as we have been able to tell, it's a problem in the Expo infrastructure and re-runnning the build in the Expo UI tends to fix it.

Public developer documentation