Announcing GoReleaser v2.5 - multi languages, 9th anniversary edition

Merry Christmas - the last release of 2024 is here!

This is hopefully the last big release of the year, and I think it’s a good one!

Rust and Zig joined the party!

The biggest highlight of this release surely is the start of the multi-language support!

Over the years, more than once, I’ve seen comments saying something along the lines of “I would love something like GoReleaser for ”.

In fact, there are things like jReleaser, cargo-dist, rustreleaser, and probably others, that are built based on some of GoReleaser’s ideas. As far as I know, all these projects are good and nice, and in fact, many years ago, I had already refactored some of GoReleaser’s codebase thinking about adding more languages to it.

My idea at the time was to support plugins, so users could provide their own builders. I quickly realized, though, that Go plugin support is less than ideal, so I kind of give that idea up, but left the refactor in there (and almost undo it a few months ago).

But I digress… GoReleaser now officially, albeit in alpha, supports both Rust and Zig!

You can use goreleaser init to create a configuration file and go from there. It should detect that you are in a Rust project (if it has a Cargo.toml) file or Zig project (if you have a build.zig file) automatically and initialize accordingly.

But, in summary, you can do something like:

builds:
  - builder: rust # or zig

And it should already do something, with hopefully good defaults.

To add a few details: the Rust builder uses the excellent cargo-zigbuild by default, but you can change the configuration to use cross as well.

On the other hand, the Zig builder uses its native zig build command.

In both cases, we’re for now limiting to some targets that on our tests seemed to work. If you disagree, please open an issue or hop in our Discord.

We also have example repositories for both: example-rust, example-zig.

Finally, Vedant made goreleaser-rust-cross, a Docker image with the toolchains needed to cross compile Rust, which might be useful for some of you!

If you work with Zig and/or Rust, we’ll be more than happy to have your feedback and help improving all this!

Thanks

This feature was quite a big undertaking, and while I’m sure it’s not perfect, it is something.

I want to thank Raphael Amorim for giving me the incentive I needed and for helping reviewing it!

Also, Vedant for helping reviewing and asking many questions, which helped shape the Rust integration quite a bit.

Finally, I want to thank the Go community, for using GoReleaser all these years, and the Rust and Zig community for being (seemingly) open to the idea!

What’s next?

Probably more languages! Join our Discord and help prioritize and shape how they’ll work. I already created a new discussion on GitHub to help prioritize languages as well. You are absolutely invited to chime in!

Once we stabilize all that, probably another major release refactoring some things that are still too Go-centric (like the usage of goos nomenclature everywhere).

Testing on Windows

This is not technically in this release, but was added in v2.4.6 and is pretty big/good news: we now run GoReleaser tests on Windows as well.

This should help reducing Windows-specific bugs - in fact, while doing that, I already fixed some.

It was pretty painful to do this using VMs, so, if you use Windows and want to help, please feel very welcome to! :)

9 years old!

December 21th marks the day of the very first GoReleaser commit. The first release came a couple of days later, on the 29th.

When I first started this, I had no idea it would last this long.

It has been a long, fun, and honoring ride! I met a lot of awesome people through OpenSource, had a lot of opportunities I wouldn’t have otherwise, and, maybe more importantly, learned a lot!

Thank you all for being a part of it!

Site and Logo

I experimented with some new logo designs, trying to make it less go-focused.

Our current logo is very good, in my opinion: it is playful, recognizable, looks cute, all that good stuff.

Still, I tried some ideas to see how they would look like, but I didn’t think any of them would live up to the original one (you’ve seen one of them in the beginning of the post), so, I’ll keep it as is for now.

Our homepage got a relatively new look, though. We reorganized some things, improved others, changed some colors, and, overall, I think it looks better.

All the artwork GoReleaser uses is made by Carine Becker, and is available here.

Other Highlights

Most of the work in this release was around multi-language support, but nevertheless, we have a few other news:

• new: publishers.if (only on Pro)
• new: AUR Sources integration
• new: webhooks expected_status_codes
• new: KOs can now build one time but publish to multiple registries¹
• new: allow editing existent draft release on GitHub
• fix: we were using Homebrew’s on_arm and on_intel constructs, but they shouldn’t be used with url in it. So we changed back to checking Hardware::CPU. Details
• deprecations: we deprecated builds.gobinary in favor of builds.tool to be more language-agnostic, and kos.registry in favor of kos.registries to support multiple registries. Details

As always, bug fixes, dependency updates, housekeeping, and documentation updates are included in this release as well.

Other news

• GoReleaser now has ~14k stars and 413 contributors! Thanks, everyone!
• We eventually discuss new features in our Discord server.  Join the conversation!
• nFPM had new releases as well,  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 here and here (for 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 licence.