GoReleaser Pro v1.11+ added support to keeping a nightly release.

That means that, whenever you want, you can run:

goreleaser releaser --clean --nightly

And it’ll delete previous nightly releases and create a new one with the current commit artifacts.

To enable it, you’ll need to change a few things in your .goreleaser.yml.

The first one, is actually enabling the nightly release publishing, and setting up the version name template, as well as instructing GoReleaser to keep a single nightly release:

# .goreleaser.yml
# ...
nightly:
  publish_release: true
  keep_single_release: true
  name_template: '{{ incminor .Version }}-nightly'
  tag_name: nightly
# ...

This will do a couple of things when you do a nightly release:

• it’ll delete the previous nightly tag and release;
• it’ll create a new nightly release
• the {{.Version}} template variable will now be the result of the name_template field above

Another change you might want to do is related to the Docker images.

Nightly releases do build and publish Docker images and manifests. If you have a :latest tag, you might not want it to be published on nightly releases.

To do that, we can change those to evaluate to an empty string when it’s a nightly release:

# .goreleaser.yml
# ...
dockers:
- image_templates:
  - 'user/repo:v{{ .Version }}'
  - '{{ if not .IsNightly }}user/repo:latest{{ end }}'
# ...

You could also do something like:

# .goreleaser.yml
# ...
dockers:
- image_templates:
  - 'user/repo:v{{ .Version }}'
  - 'user/repo:latest{{ if .IsNightly }}-nightly{{ end }}'
# ...

So it’ll create a :latest-nightly tag along with the :v{{ .Version }} one.

The same thing applies to Docker Manifests:

# .goreleaser.yml
# ...
docker_manifests:
- name_template: '{{ if not .IsNightly }}user/repo:latest{{ end }}'
  image_templates:
  - 'user/repo:v{{ .Version }}-amd64'
  - 'user/repo:v{{ .Version }}-arm64'
# ...

Basically any empty Docker image_template or Docker Manifest name_template is ignored.

GitHub Actions

I don’t particularly want to run GoReleaser in my machine to build and release anything, so I also created a GitHub Actions workflow for it:

# .github/workflows/nightly.yml
name: goreleaser-nightly

on:
  workflow_dispatch:

permissions:
  contents: write
  packages: write

jobs:
  goreleaser:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
      - uses: actions/setup-go@v2
        with:
          go-version: 1.19
      - uses: goreleaser/goreleaser-action@v3
        with:
          distribution: goreleaser-pro
          version: latest
          args: release --clean --nightly
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          # Your GoReleaser Pro key:
          GORELEASER_KEY: ${{ secrets.GORELEASER_KEY }}

This way, when I want to release a new nightly, I can just run the workflow in the “Actions” tab of the repository.

And it works:

You can see the latest nightly release here.

Of course, you can also automate it to run, say, daily, or on each commit to the main branch:

# .github/workflows/nightly.yml
name: goreleaser-nightly

on:
  # release every commit to main:
  push:
    branches:
      - 'main'

  # release daily:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 * * * *'

# ...

You can read more about it in the GitHub Documentation.

Only on GoReleaser Pro

This is only available on GoReleaser Pro. If you want to give it a try, you have an one-week free trial, and since your read all this post here, you can also use this $20 discount, limited to the first 20 people.

I hope you like it!

Well, that’s what I had to show you today! I hope it’s helpful somehow, and I’ll see you in the next one!