Packaging & releases

Artifact names

Composed from discovery, so a matrix build produces names you can tell apart without reading the job title:

<build-name>_<OS>_<ARCH>_<TAG or SHORT_SHA>

myApp_Ubuntu-22.04_amd64_ab12cd3
myApp_macos_arm64_v1.2.3

Branch and pull-request builds use the short SHA; tag builds use the tag.

Releases

A release is published only on a refs/tags/* ref. Branch and PR builds upload artifacts and stop there, so nothing you push to a branch can create a release by accident.

on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
    tags: ["v*"]

With that trigger, main gives you downloadable artifacts and v1.2.3 gives you a release.

Release assets

Each platform stages its binary as one zip, <prefix>-<os>-<arch>.zip, holding the binary under its own name. Two things follow from that shape.

The name carries no version, so /releases/latest/download/core-linux-amd64.zip resolves — which is what makes a release usable as a download source rather than only as a record. And the archive extracts to core, not core-linux-amd64, because the second is a name nobody wants to type or put on PATH.

zip does the work on Linux and macOS and keeps the executable bit. Windows has no zip, so PowerShell’s Compress-Archive covers it — it ships with the OS. 7-Zip is deliberately not used: it happens to be on GitHub’s images, which is exactly what makes assuming it a trap on any other runner.

Debian packages

- uses: dAppCore/build@v4
  with:
    build-name: core
    deb: true
    deb-maintainer: "Lethean <dev@lethean.io>"
    deb-description: "Core developer CLI"

A zip is a download; a .deb is an install:

sudo apt install ./core_1.2.3_amd64.deb
core --version
sudo apt remove core

The package goes on PATH, is recorded in the package database, and comes off cleanly — none of which unzipping does.

Linux runners only, and only on a tag. A macOS or Windows Debian package is not a thing, so the step says so and skips rather than failing the job for asking.

dpkg-deb builds it, since it is already on every Ubuntu runner. Architecture is translated from GOARCH, because the two vocabularies agree on amd64 and arm64 and disagree on the rest — 386 has to ship as i386 or apt will not install it on the machine it was built for.

Currently wired for the Go stack. Other stacks accept the input and ignore it.

Turning it off

- uses: dAppCore/build@v4
  with:
    build-name: myApp
    package: false

Nothing is uploaded and no release is created, whatever the ref.