CI/CD for the CLI

Each time we want create a new tag in GitHub for the CLI, we want to release a new version.

Each release will contain the the CLI compiled for several architectures and operating systems.

To achieve that we are going to use GoReleaser.

Installation and basic configurations

Let's start by installing GoReleaser following the instructions in install page.

Next, generate the GoReleaser configuration file by running:

goreleaser init

This will generate a file named .goreleaser.yaml and add the dist folder to the .gitignore file.

Let's clean up a bit the .goreleaser.yaml file:

before:
  hooks:
    - go mod tidy
builds:
  - env:
      - CGO_ENABLED=0
    goos:
      - linux
      - windows
      - darwin
archives:
  - replacements:
      darwin: Darwin
      linux: Linux
      windows: Windows
      386: i386
      amd64: x86_64
checksum:
  name_template: 'checksums.txt'
snapshot:
  name_template: "-next"
changelog:
  sort: asc
  filters:
    exclude:
      - '^docs:'
      - '^test:'

You can test the configuration by running:

goreleaser release --snapshot --rm-dist

If you inspect the dist folder you can see the binaries for several operating systems.

You can try to run the one for your case (mine is linux):

 ./dist/learning-go-cli_linux_amd64/learning-go-cli

Which should output:

The learning-go-api provides with utility functions like UUID
generation, a currency converter, a JWT debugger, etc.

Usage:
 learning-go-cli [command]

Available Commands:
 completion  Generate the autocompletion script for the specified shell
 configure   Configures the CLI
 help        Help about any command
 programming Programming tools

Flags:
 -h, --help      help for learning-go-cli
 -v, --version   version for learning-go-cli

Use "learning-go-cli [command] --help" for more information about a command.

Adding a GitHub action

We will create a GitHub action to release the CLI each time a new tag is created.

As we don't have any workflow let's create the base folder for workflows:

mkdir -p .github/workflows

Then create the .github/workflows/release.yaml file with the following contents:

name: goreleaser

on:
  push:
    tags:
      - '*'

jobs:
  goreleaser:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      -
        name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
      -
        name: Set up Go
        uses: actions/setup-go@v2
        with:
          go-version: 1.17
      -
        name: Run GoReleaser
        uses: goreleaser/goreleaser-action@v2
        with:
          distribution: goreleaser
          version: latest
          args: release --rm-dist
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: $

After, let's test it with act like we did before.

We need to create the .github/workflows/push-tag.json file:

touch .github/workflows/push-tag.json

The file contents are:

{
    "push": {
        "ref": "refs/tags/v0.0.1"
    }
}

Run act:

act push \
    -e .github/workflows/push-tag.json \
    -s GITHUB_TOKEN \
    --verbose

Wait for the command to finish.

Wrap up

Create and push a tag:

git tag -a v0.0.1 -m "v0.0.1"  
git push origin v0.0.1

After a couple of minutes, head to GitHub and a new release should be created.

The contents will be similar to:

Next

The next section is Challenge: Add the programming/jwtdebugger command to the CLI.