Using Homebrew for distributing Go apps (part 2)

2023-04-13

Go · Golang · Goreleaser · Homebrew · Ruby · Tech

1 minute

For personal reference:

This is a followup on a previous post that is a bit more manual. This is a little bit easier.

a) Create your own Homebrew tap

Create a new GitHub public repository with a prefix homebrew-, i.e. homebrew-tap. This will host all the apps that you want to distribute via your tap. Users will install your apps using the following commands:

# No need to include the 'homebrew-' prefix
$ brew tap flowerinthenight/tap
$ brew install <toolname>

# Or one-liner
$ brew install flowerinthenight/tap/<toolname>

b) Let’s use Github Actions to setup goreleaser

First, add a .goreleaser.yml config file to your Go repo. Here’s an example:

Copy 
version: 2
builds:
- id: "kubepfm"
  binary: kubepfm
  goos:
  - linux
  - darwin
  goarch:
  - amd64
checksum:
  name_template: 'checksums.txt'
dist: /tmp/kubepfm/dist
changelog:
  sort: asc
  filters:
    exclude:
    - '^docs:'
    - '^test:'
release:
  github:
    owner: flowerinthenight
    name: kubepfm
brews:
- repository:
    owner: flowerinthenight
    name: homebrew-tap
  name: kubepfm
  homepage: "https://github.com/flowerinthenight/kubepfm"
  description: "A simple port-forward wrapper tool for multiple pods/deployments/services."
  directory: Formula
  install: |
    bin.install "kubepfm"
   test: |
    assert_match /A simple port-forward wrapper tool for multiple pods\/deployments\/services/, shell_output("#{bin}/kubepfm -h", 0)
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The section of note here is the brews: part. You can check goreleaser’s Quickstart guide for more information.

Here’s an example of a GitHub Action config on how to setup goreleaser to do the release for our tags.

Copy 
---
name: main
 
on:
  push:
    branches: [ master ]
    tags: ['*']
  pull_request:
    branches: [ master ]
 
jobs:
  codeberg:
    name: Codeberg
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
 
      - name: Mirror to Codeberg
        uses: yesolutions/mirror-action@master
        with:
          REMOTE: "https://codeberg.org/flowerinthenight/kubepfm.git"
          GIT_USERNAME: flowerinthenight
          GIT_PASSWORD: ${{ secrets.GIT_PASSWORD }}
 
  build:
    name: Build
    if: "!contains(github.event.commits[0].message, 'ci skip')"
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      with:
        fetch-depth: 0
 
    - name: Setup Go
      uses: actions/setup-go@v4
      with:
        go-version: '1.21'
 
    - name: Run tests
      run: go test -v ./...
 
    - name: Build binary
      run: go build -v
 
    - name: Run goreleaser
      uses: goreleaser/goreleaser-action@v3
      if: startsWith(github.ref, 'refs/tags/')
      with:
        distribution: goreleaser
        version: latest
        args: release --clean
      env:
        GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GH_PAT }}
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See the name: Run goreleaser section. You need to add a personal access token with repo, workflow, write:packages permissions to your repository’s secrets. In this example, the name used is GH_PAT but you can use other names as well.

c) Do a tagged release

Tagged releases should now do a deployment to your tap.

$ git tag v1.0.0
$ git push --tags