Release automation and testing on CI

Discussed on: [1] [2]

I am the kind of guy that feels annoyed when doing the same thing twice by process, like fill the same task on two places, so I often look for a way to automate. Also, I do not like to do repetitive stuff often like checking for dependencies on my not so active projects.

For this repetitive stuff of checking for dependencies I rely on the renovate bot1 but often the users don’t clone the project to use the software, so I had to find a way to setup releases and build artifacts to them. As I am using GitHub Actions because I am on GitHub and I am most comfortable using it, mostly because of choice inertia to be honest.

I may translate the renovate post from portuguese2 to english soon.

Going back to the release problem, what I did is to basically move it all to an Autorelease workflow. In my GitHub, most of the projects that are not just “Deploy to Vercel” are having that or being archived.

The specific approaches actually depend on the things used to develop that specific software, but it’s mostly the same.

Basically the repository has the following items:

How the workflow is set up

I’ll take the workflow from ts-proxy3. I think it’s one of the reference implementations and often the one that I copy over to new projects when I am setting it up on another project, even when the project is not made in Golang.

name: Autorelease

on:
  push:
    branches:
    - main
    tags:
    - '*'
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      new_version:
        description: 'New tag version'
        default: 'patch'
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 2 * * 6' # saturday 2am
jobs:
  autorelease:
    env:
      REGISTRY: ghcr.io
      IMAGE_NAME: ${{ github.repository }}
      USERNAME: ${{ github.actor }}
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      contents: write
      packages: write
      attestations: write
      id-token: write
      pull-requests: write
    steps:

    - uses: actions/checkout@v5
    - name: Setup git config
      run: |
        git config user.name actions-bot
        git config user.email actions-bot@users.noreply.github.com

    - uses: jdx/mise-action@v3

    - name: Create Pull Request if there is new stuff from updaters
      uses: peter-evans/create-pull-request@v7
      id: pr_create
      with:
        commit-message: Updater script changes
        branch: updater-bot
        delete-branch: true
        title: "Updater: stuff changed"
        body: |
          Changes caused from update scripts

    - name: Stop if a pull request was created
      env:
        PR_NUMBER: ${{ steps.pr_create.outputs.pull-request-number }}
      run: |
        if [[ ! -z "$PR_NUMBER" ]]; then
          echo "The update scripts changed something and a PR was created. Giving up deploy." >> $GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY
          exit 1
        fi

    - name: Build binaries
      env:
        TAG: ${{ env.REGISTRY }}/${{ env.IMAGE_NAME }}
      run: |
        echo "::group::Build container"
        docker build -t "$TAG:latest" .
        echo "::endgroup::"

        mkdir build -p && ls && pwd

        echo "# Built targets" >> $GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY
        export CGO_ENABLED=0
        go tool dist list | grep -v wasm | while IFS=/ read -r GOOS GOARCH; do
          echo "::group::Build $GOOS/$GOARCH"
          GOOS=$GOOS GOARCH=$GOARCH go build -v -o build/ts-proxyd-$GOOS-$GOARCH ./cmd/ts-proxyd && (echo "- $GOOS/$GOARCH" >> $GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY) || true
          echo "::endgroup::"
        done

    - name: Make release if everything looks right
      env:
        NEW_VERSION: ${{ github.event.inputs.new_version }}
      run: |
        if [[ ! -z "$NEW_VERSION" ]]; then
          NO_TAG=1 ./make_release "$NEW_VERSION"
          echo "New version: $(cat version.txt)" >> $GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY
          echo "RELEASE_VERSION=$(cat version.txt)" >> $GITHUB_ENV
        fi

    - name: Create release
      if: env.RELEASE_VERSION != ''
      env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          TAG: ${{ env.RELEASE_VERSION }}
          TITLE: Release ${{ env.RELEASE_VERSION }}
      run: |
        gh release create "$TAG" \
          --title "$TITLE" \
          --generate-notes \
          --notes-start-tag $(gh release list --limit 1 --json tagName -q .[].tagName) 

    - uses: svenstaro/upload-release-action@v2
      if: env.RELEASE_VERSION != ''
      with:
        repo_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        file: build/*
        tag: ${{ env.RELEASE_VERSION }}
        overwrite: true
        file_glob: true

    - name: Login to registry
      uses: docker/login-action@v3
      if: env.RELEASE_VERSION != ''
      with:
        registry: ${{ env.REGISTRY }}
        username: ${{ env.USERNAME }}
        password: ${{ github.token }}

    - name: "Build and publish container"
      env:
        TAG: ${{ env.REGISTRY }}/${{ env.IMAGE_NAME }}
      if: env.RELEASE_VERSION != ''
      run: |
        VERSION="$(cat version.txt)"
        docker tag "$TAG:latest" "$TAG:$VERSION"
        docker push "$TAG:$VERSION"
        docker push "$TAG:latest"

First things first, if you want to take a workflow like this, you must in the project settings enable an option so GitHub Actions can create PRs. It will not explode if you don’t do that, but it’s an avoidable workflow failure. Not gonna lie, I often forget that when setting up new projects!

As you may have noticed, this bad boy has a lot of triggers.

Now for the jobs part, there is only one. No need for more!

First, there is the env part, where I setup some variables to use below.

The steps part I can separate in the following phases:

Now I am using mostly Mise to setup the build environment. This is not the first iteration. I used Nix before and had good results with it, but Nix has a little annoying problem: It forces you to go all-in. Also, it doesn’t allow one to use a specific version of packages without adding a significant amount of complexity. And as Nix is mostly Linux specific it limits adoption of the software being built by it to other platforms. Mise doesn’t have this problem. I used it to setup the JRE on Windows for a Java program I am doing to a company, and it worked really well. Also, the environment setup of those projects is mostly simple enough that Mise could do it in a much simpler and faster way.

This system could be very likely ported to another CI system, and that may be a future project, but the way GitHub Actions and Renovate works is simple enough for this to not be urgent.

And that’s it. That’s how I am shipping software faster and with less annoyances. Want me to set it up for you? Let me know at lucas@lew.tec.br!

  1. Renovate: GitHub ↩︎

  2. Renovate post in portuguese: Post ↩︎

  3. ts-proxy: GitHub. ↩︎