EAS Build fails with tar Permission denied during Prepare project (free plan, SDK 54)

[antoineunifiber]

Summary

All EAS builds fail during the Prepare project phase with tar: Permission denied errors on every directory. This started on 2026-03-22 evening — builds were working fine that same morning.

Environment

• EAS CLI: 18.4.0
• Expo SDK: 54.0.0
• Platform: Android (preview profile, APK)
• Node: 24.14.0 (Windows 11)
• Plan: Free
• Account: antoinevdsw
• EAS_NO_VCS: 1 (project not in git)

Error

Upload succeeds (841 KB), but extraction on the EAS server fails immediately:

tar: app/(phone): Cannot mkdir: Permission denied
tar: app/(tablet): Cannot mkdir: Permission denied
tar: src/components: Cannot mkdir: Permission denied
tar: assets/: Cannot mkdir: Permission denied
...
Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

All directories are affected, not just those with special characters.

Reproduction

Build IDs (all failed with same error):

• f8ce77ff-507e-4ed4-a63e-2e079c05c3f6 — image: latest (ubuntu-24.04)
• daec4692-cb0e-4e85-8103-adb6ae9f3aea — image: latest
• 48b6c13a-0599-40d3-9f01-eb67efa22fcf — image: ubuntu-22.04-jdk-17-ndk-r26b
• 3d46274e-e860-46e4-abbe-2358f0e1820e — image: ubuntu-22.04-jdk-17-ndk-r26b + --clear-cache

Tested with both latest and ubuntu-22.04-jdk-17-ndk-r26b images. Also tried --clear-cache. Same result every time.

What changed

• Last successful build: 2026-03-22 morning
• First failure: 2026-03-22 evening
• No code changes between working and failing builds
• The project uses expo-router with route groups (phone) and (tablet), but since ALL directories fail (including src/, assets/), parentheses are not the root cause

Expected behavior

Tar extraction should succeed and the build should proceed to npm install and compilation.

[adil-khursheed]

I am also facing the same issue.

Environment -

EAS CLI: 18.4.0
Expo SDK: 54.0.32
Platform: Android (preview profile, APK)
Node: 22.16.0 (Windows 11)
Plan: Free
Account: adilkhursheed