GoReleaser: build and push Snapcraft packages from TravisCI

GoReleaser was able to build Snapcraft packages for a long time, but it wasn’t able to push them until today. Let’s see how to wrap to your TravisCI build!

Since v0.28.0, GoReleaser can create Snapcraft packages and upload them to the GitHub release. On v0.91.0, we added the support to also push those packages to the snap store.

On this post I’ll show how to wrap that with you TravisCI configuration.

GoReleaser part

Let’s assume you have a Snapcraft section more or less like the below on you .goreleaser.yml file:

# .goreleaser.yaml
snapcraft:
  summary: Foo bar
  description: |
        Longer foo bar

The only change needed here is to add a publish: true to the configuration, like this:

# .goreleaser.yaml
snapcraft:
  summary: Foo bar
  publish: true # <- this line
  description: |
        Longer foo bar

And that should be it on the GoReleaser side.

TravisCI part

On your .travis.yml, you probably have something like this:

language: go
go: "1.11.x"
script: make build
deploy:
  - provider: script
    skip_cleanup: true
    script: curl -sL http://git.io/goreleaser | bash
    on:
      tags: true

So, the first step is to install Snapcraft on Travis, we can do it with a combination of addons, env and install:

language: go
go: "1.11.x"

# added
addons:
  apt:
    packages:
      - snapd
env:
  - PATH=/snap/bin:$PATH
install:
  - sudo snap install snapcraft --classic
# end added

script: make build
deploy:
  - provider: script
    skip_cleanup: true
    script: curl -sL http://git.io/goreleaser | bash
    on:
      tags: true

Now, we need to do an export login on Snapcraft:

snapcraft export-login snap.login

This will create a snap.login file. Make sure to add it to the .gitignore:

echo snap.login >> .gitignore

Now, we need to somehow add that file to Travis. The way we do that is to use the encrypt file Travis’ feature:

travis encrypt-file snap.login --add

This will add a line more or less like this to our .travis.yml:

before_install:
  - openssl aes-256-cbc -K $encrypted_123abc123_key -iv $encrypted_123abc123_iv -in snap.login.enc -out snap.login -d

So, the only step left is to do a Snapcraft login on Travis, just add this to your .travis.yml:

after_success:
  - test -n "$TRAVIS_TAG" && snapcraft login --with snap.login

So, in the end, our .travis.yml will look like this:

language: go
go: "1.11.x"
addons:
  apt:
    packages:
      - snapd
env:
  - PATH=/snap/bin:$PATH
before_install:
  - openssl aes-256-cbc -K $encrypted_123abc123_key -iv $encrypted_123abc123_iv -in snap.login.enc -out snap.login -d
install:
  - sudo snap install snapcraft --classic
script: make build
after_success:
  - test -n "$TRAVIS_TAG" && snapcraft login --with snap.login
deploy:
  - provider: script
    skip_cleanup: true
    script: curl -sL http://git.io/goreleaser | bash
    on:
      tags: true

Wrapping up

Now you can just do a git tag v1.2.3; git push --tags, and TravisCI will GoReleaser, which will do all the work for us.

If you are creating a new snap, you will also need to register the snap first:

snapcraft register ${APP_NAME}

You can also move thing around, for example, the snap install snapcraft, snapcraft login can be in the after_success part, depending on how you build your app.

I’m not sure if this is the best way of doing this, but it works. You can see that the GoReleaser v0.91.1 released itself to the Snapcraft store by looking into the build logs.

That means you can now install GoReleaser on Linux using something like:

snap install goreleaser --classic

Maybe it’s worth mention that this was implemented in Hacktoberfest Joinville! Great to see you all there!

Hope you enjoy it! Cheers!