Introduction

Hello, DEV World! 😉 Continuing the series of articles on automating routine using the excellent CI/CD tool — GitHub Actions.

It's time to automate the releases of your applications written on Go!

📝 Table of contents

• What will we automate?
  • Repository structure
• Configure GitHub Action
• Troubleshooting
• Time to release!
  • Real-life example
• Questions for better understanding
• Exercises for independent execution

🤔 What will we automate?

If you've ever faced the challenge of releasing a project written on Go for different platforms/OS, you already know what kind of problems you may come across. If not, I will bring some of them:

• You need to constantly monitor the features of each OS (for example, specific slashes in the paths).
• You need to create archives manually and upload them to the release page on GitHub.
• You need to look at all the commits to make CHANGELOG for a new version.
• ...and many more!

So, what if I told you that there is a tool that will allow you to do all this (and more) automatically after creating a tag in your repository?

I'm not kidding, it allows you to do all this with GoReleaser GitHub action 👇

name: goreleaser

on:
  pull_request:
  push:

permissions:
  contents: write

jobs:
  goreleaser:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      -
        name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
      -
        name: Set up Go
        uses: actions/setup-go@v5
      -
        name: Run GoReleaser
        uses: goreleaser/goreleaser-action@v6
        with:
          # either 'goreleaser' (default) or 'goreleaser-pro'
          distribution: goreleaser
          # 'latest', 'nightly', or a semver
          version: '~> v2'
          args: release --clean
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          # Your GoReleaser Pro key, if you are using the 'goreleaser-pro' distribution
          # GORELEASER_KEY: ${{ secrets.GORELEASER_KEY }}

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👀 Repository structure

For a short, project will be contain very simple function:

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    fmt.Println("Hi, DEV World! 😉")
}

And the repository structure will be as simple as that:

.
├── .github
│   └── workflows
│       └── release_build.yml  # <-- GitHub Action
└── main.go                    # <-- main function

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🤖 Configure GitHub Action

Let's move on to the main character of our story. Look at the listing of the file release_build.yml, which already has a lot of familiar elements (if you did read my previous articles about GitHub Action 😏):

name: Release Go project

on:
  push:
    tags:
      - "*" # triggers only if push new tag version, like `0.8.4` or else

jobs:
  build:
    name: GoReleaser build
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - name: Check out code into the Go module directory
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0 # See: https://goreleaser.com/ci/actions/

      - name: Set up Go 1.14
        uses: actions/setup-go@v2
        with:
          go-version: 1.14
        id: go

      - name: Run GoReleaser
        uses: goreleaser/goreleaser-action@master
        with:
          version: latest
          args: release --rm-dist
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GO_RELEASER_GITHUB_TOKEN }}

Yes, GitHub automatically creates a GITHUB_TOKEN secret to use in your workflow, but I recommend to create your own token with repo scopes here:

And now, create new GitHub secret (GO_RELEASER_GITHUB_TOKEN in my case):

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✅ Troubleshooting

If your file with main() function is not in the root directory of your repository, GoReleaser will generate an error. Therefore, you will need to specify the correct directory in the step settings, for example like this:

# ...

    steps:

      # ...

      - name: Run GoReleaser
        uses: goreleaser/goreleaser-action@master
        with:
          version: latest
          args: release --rm-dist
          workdir: ./cmd/myapp # <-- path to directory with main() func
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GO_RELEASER_GITHUB_TOKEN }}

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🚀 Time to release!

Create new release with tag (in my case, it's 0.8.4) and go to Actions page in order to follow up on the job:

After successfully completing the job, go to release page to see awesome result: CHANGELOG with all of your commits (between two versions), checksums.txt file and uploaded archives with compiled apps for all platforms!

That's it! Just like that! 🎉

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🎯 Real-life example

If the screenshots above are not enough, I invite you to look at the one of my projects, where I use GoReleaser action in real-life:

go install github.com/create-go-app/cli/v4/cmd/cgapp@latest

# Tap a new formula:
brew tap create-go-app/tap

# Installation:
brew install create-go-app/tap/cgapp

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💬 Questions for better understanding

1. Which parameter in the GitHub Actions config is triggering job?
2. Why we need to define fetch-depth: 0 for actions/checkout action?
3. What does the -rm-dist argument mean in Run GoReleaser step?

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✏️ Exercises for independent execution

• Repeat everything you have seen in the article, but with your own Golang project. Please, write about your result & link to your shorter website in the comments below!
• Change the triggering value so that it only works for major versions. Please, read more about software versioning here.

↑ Table of contents

Photos/Images by

• GoReleaser Action repository & website (links: 1, 2)
• GitHub repository settings (link)

P.S.

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