Example: working at Acme

This walks through how one developer uses EASwitch day to day. The people and companies are made up; swap in your own.

The situation

Jane is a React Native developer. She works with three Expo accounts:

Account	What it's for	Expo user
Personal	Her own side-project apps	jane
Acme	Her employer, Acme, where she works on the Acme Shop app	jane-acme
Globex	A client she freelances for	a robot user the client gave her

Before EASwitch, every switch meant eas logout, eas login, then remembering to switch back. Once, she nearly published an Acme update from her personal account.

Day one: set up once

npm install -g easwitch

She adds each account once:

easw add personal     # "Log in with Expo in your browser", signed in as jane
easw add acme         # "Log in with SSO", with her Acme work login
easw add globex       # "Paste an access token": the client sent her a robot token

She keeps typing plain eas out of habit, so she turns on the shell hook once, and opens a new terminal:

easw hook

✓ Account "personal" added (Expo user: jane)
✓ Account "acme" added (Expo user: jane-acme)
✓ Account "globex" added (Expo user: globex-ci)

Her personal account was added first, so it's the current one: the account easw uses outside linked projects.

Link each project to its account

cd ~/code/acme-shop
easw link acme

cd ~/code/globex-app
easw link globex

Each project now has a small .easwitch.json saying which account it belongs to. EASwitch also added it to each project's .gitignore, because account names are personal.

From now on, every eas command in a linked project runs as that project's account, thanks to the hook. Not just builds: eas whoami, eas build, eas update, eas submit, eas env:list, eas credentials all use it, in the project folder and all its subfolders. (If she hadn't set up the hook, easw link would have offered to.)

Check the link right away

Run eas whoami in the project. It should show the Expo user you expect, jane-acme here. If it shows another user, the token belongs to the wrong account: add it again with easw add acme --force and sign in as the right user.

User, not organization

An EASwitch account picks the Expo user whose token runs the command. It doesn't choose an Expo organization or change who owns the app. Acme's app must already belong to Acme's Expo organization, and jane-acme must have access to it.

A normal day

Morning, working on Acme Shop. She types eas, as always:

cd ~/code/acme-shop
eas whoami

› easw: using account "acme" (linked in .easwitch.json)
jane-acme (authenticated using EXPO_TOKEN)

eas build --platform ios
eas update --branch production --message "Fix checkout button"
eas env:list --environment production

All three run as Acme. She never typed acme.

Afternoon, a fix for the client:

cd ~/code/globex-app/src/screens
eas submit --platform android

› easw: using account "globex" (linked in ../../.easwitch.json)

It works from a subfolder too. EASwitch found the link at the project root.

Evening, her own app, which isn't linked:

cd ~/code/my-habit-tracker
eas whoami

jane

This project isn't linked, so eas is just her normal Expo login, untouched. (easw commands in unlinked folders use her current EASwitch account, personal.)

Without the hook

If Jane didn't want eas to change, she could skip easw hook and type easw instead: easw whoami, easw build, easw submit. They use the linked account the same way, and plain eas stays her normal login everywhere.

Checking where she is

When she's unsure which account a folder uses:

easw current

Current EASwitch account: personal
This project is linked to: acme (/Users/jane/code/acme-shop/.easwitch.json)

Common situations

The client revoked a token

A Globex build fails with an authentication error. She checks all her tokens:

easw list --check

○ acme      jane-acme  ✓ valid
○ globex    ✗ The bearer token is invalid.
● personal  jane       ✓ valid

Replace a token with `easw add globex --force`.

The client sends a new token, and she replaces it:

easw add globex --force

A new teammate joins Acme

Her teammate Sam clones acme-shop. .easwitch.json is gitignored, so Sam sets up his own:

npm install -g easwitch
easw add acme
cd acme-shop && easw link acme

Sam can pick any local name for the account; it only has to match what he links. If a link file had been committed with an account name Sam doesn't have, EASwitch would stop with an error instead of quietly using another account.

A new laptop

Tokens are stored in each computer's own keychain, so on a new machine she runs easw add for each account again and re-links her projects.

The contract ends

When the Globex work finishes:

cd ~/code/globex-app && easw unlink
easw remove globex

If she had added Globex by logging in, EASwitch would remind her to also revoke the token it created, in her access token settings. Here the client owns the robot token, so they revoke it.

What Jane gets out of it

• She switches between Acme, Globex and personal work by changing folders.
• She keeps typing eas. In a linked project, every command from eas whoami to eas submit uses the right account.
• The status line always says which account ran, and why.
• A project linked to an account she doesn't have stops with an error, so nothing ships under the wrong account.
• Her normal eas login keeps working as before.

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