Announcing GoReleaser v2.12

This version introduces the new version of the Docker integration, Docker image attestation, Makeself packaging support, Go 1.25, and much more!

Docker v2

The dockers feature in GoReleaser is rather old: it’s from a time before multi-architecture Docker images (manifests). Its configuration is also very verbose and repetitive.

These were problems we were aiming to solve for a while, and after a lot of discussion, we arrived at what I think is a good solution.

It’ll be in alpha stage for a while, and you can use it as dockers_v2 in your configuration.

Once we’re set on the API, we’ll deprecate dockers and docker_manifests.

Eventually, when we launch GoReleaser v3, the old features will be removed, and dockers_v2 will simply be dockers.

That all being said, let’s dive in!

How it works

Basically, we’ll always use docker buildx to build the manifest. This means:

• no more dockers + docker_manifests wiring
• no more tags with the architecture in them (i.e. no more intermediate images)
• no more docker image configuration repetition

Depending on how familiar you are with Docker manifests, you may be asking “how does this work when I do a local build with --snapshot?” - and that’s a great question! Manifests require us to push the images, so, to avoid doing that in snapshot builds, when the build is a snapshot, GoReleaser will automatically “explode” the build configuration by platform, and build local images with the architecture in the tag. This allows you to still test both the build process and correctness of the images without having to push any images.

How to use it?

A simple configuration would look like this:

# .goreleaser.yaml
dockers_v2:
  - images:
      - user/repo
    tags:
      - "{{.Version}}"
      - latest
    platform:
      - linux/amd64
      - linux/arm64

And the Dockerfile might look like so:

# Dockerfile
FROM scratch
ARG TARGETPLATFORM
ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/bin/myprogram"]
COPY $TARGETPLATFORM/myprogram /usr/bin/

You can add however many images and tags you want, and GoReleaser will build the combination of all of them. You can also set annotations, labels, Docker flags, etc.

Read the documentation for more information.

Makeself

Makeself allows to create packages that self-extract/run. GoReleaser now supports creating them.

You basically only need to set the script that it’ll run after extracting your binary.

Here’s an example:

# .goreleaser.yaml
makeselfs:
  - script: ./run.sh

Your shell script can simply be:

#!/bin/sh
# run.sh
./myprogram $*

And it should work. Read the documentation for more information.

Attestations

You can now also more easily attest your Docker images within GitHub actions.

Basically, GoReleaser will now automatically generate ./dist/digests.txt file, which you can then pass to the attest action:

# ./.github/workflows/release.yml
# ...
permissions:
  # ...
  # Give the workflow permission to write attestations.
  id-token: write
  attestations: write

jobs:
  release:
    # ...
    steps:
      # ...
      - uses: goreleaser/goreleaser-action@v6
        with:
          # ...
      # After GoReleaser runs, attest all the files in ./dist/checksums.txt:
      - uses: actions/attest-build-provenance@v2
        with:
          subject-checksums: ./dist/checksums.txt
      # After GoReleaser runs, attest all the images in ./dist/digests.txt:
      - uses: actions/attest-build-provenance@v2
        with:
          subject-checksums: ./dist/digests.txt

This will create 2 attestations, one for binaries/archives/etc and another one for your Docker images.

Read the documentation for more information.

Thanks to Brian DeHamer from the GitHub team for the help making this happen!

Smarter semver tag sorting

If you do constant pre-releases, this is for you!

Imagine you have a history like this:

v0.1.0
v0.2.0-beta.1
v0.2.0-beta.2
v0.2.0-beta.3
v0.2.0

And you want to release v0.2.0. Usually, GoReleaser would get v0.2.0-beta.3 as previous version, but that’s likely not what most people would expect (v0.1.0).

Smart semver will ignore pre-release versions in these cases, making the release notes more complete.

To use it, add this to your configuration:

# .goreleaser.yaml
git:
  tag_sort: smartsemver

If you were to release v0.2.0-beta.3, though, it would still get v0.2.0-beta.2 as previous version, which I think makes sense.

See the documentation for more details.

Other highlights

• pro: create nightly releases as drafts (nightly.draft)
• pro: set custom body in pull requests
• pro: set the changelog title
• pro: commit_author can now be set globally in metadata
• builds/bun: allowing more targets
• builds/go: updated allowed targets
• mcp: can now give instructions to the LLM on how to fix deprecations
• templates: add readFile and mustReadFile
• upload,artifactory: allow to set password
• upload,artifactory: allow templates in username
• docker: retry configurations
• brew: uses && instead of and
• cask: removes conflicts_with (deprecated by Homebrew)

Other news

• GoReleaser now has ~15.1k stars and 440 contributors! Thanks, everyone!
• We often discuss new features in our Discord server.  Join the conversation!
• nFPM had new releases as well,  check it out.
• The GoReleaser Action had a new release, check it out

Download

You can install or upgrade using your favorite package manager, or see the full release notes and download the pre-compiled binaries from GitHub:

Install v2.12.0 (OSS) v2.12.0 (Pro)

Helping out

You can help by reporting issues, contributing features, documentation improvements, and bug fixes. You can also sponsor the project, or get a GoReleaser Pro license.

Get the Pro license Sponsor the project