Manage your app releases from the commandline with github-release

Recently I started on a new side-project: gofinance. It dowloads and stores financial data from the likes of Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg et al. It’s under heavy development but already provides me with a nice way of viewing my stocks from the commandline. A blog post about it is underway but I’m waiting until I can get a bit of security analysis code commited.

Anyway, I felt the need to upload binaries when I got around to tagging a usable release. Normally one would go to github after tagging and pushing, and create the release manually, adding a description and uploading the binaries.

Naturally, being a programmer, I wasn’t content with this repetitive clicking, so I automated the task, and github-release was born.

It makes use of the rather recent github API for managing releases, and takes care of the dirty work for you.

It also allows you to check the current state of your releases. A small example of some output I get out of the current version for the github-release repo itself:

$ github-release info -u aktau -r github-release
git tags:
- v0.3 (commit: https://api.github.com/repos/aktau/github-release/commits/b30980cb2a0850689e9f68a75549e52f73893e0d)
- v0.2 (commit: https://api.github.com/repos/aktau/github-release/commits/264d2373ef74f60e94726ef37c5a7ee9164412d2)
- v0.1 (commit: https://api.github.com/repos/aktau/github-release/commits/20fa17d227789813e8a7bc24137d384f8e7e7a33)
releases:
-  v0.3, name: 'v0.3', description: 'v0.3', id: 167330, tagged: 30/01/2014 at 23:27, published: 30/01/2014 at 23:27, draft: ✔, prerelease: ✔
  - artifact: darwin-amd64-github-release.tar.bz2, downloads: 0, state: uploaded, type: application/octet-stream, size: 2.0MB, id: 68861
  - artifact: freebsd-amd64-github-release.tar.bz2, downloads: 0, state: uploaded, type: application/octet-stream, size: 2.0MB, id: 68862
  - artifact: linux-amd64-github-release.tar.bz2, downloads: 0, state: uploaded, type: application/octet-stream, size: 2.0MB, id: 68863
  - artifact: windows-amd64-github-release.zip, downloads: 0, state: uploaded, type: application/octet-stream, size: 2.1MB, id: 68864

So there are 3 tags, and only one of them has a formal github release (v0.3). It has 4 artifacts, all about 2MB in size. I’ve automated this entire process in a makefile, so all I have to do is run make release whenever I’ve made a new tag and presto, it builds all executables, makes a formal release and uploads the artifacts. Check out the makefile on the project page.

All of this is made infinitely easier by the fact that golang has awesome support for cross-compilation. I can make a windows binary from the comfort of my OSX environment by just issuing:

$ GOARCH=amd64 GOOS=windows go build

And presto, there’s a brand new app.exe in the directory. This, combined with the fact that Go generates static binaries that are entirely self-contained, makes for the easiest distribution and deployment steps I’ve had in years. It’s at least 1/4th of the reason why I enjoy making stuff in Go. (others are ease of writing/reading, speed, great standard library, …). No more rbenv, virtualenv, pip, or whatever shenanigans the next scripting language du jour comes up with.