• Configuration
  • Configuration File
    • Archive Aliases
  • Template Expansion
  • Environment Variables
• Glob Matching
• Partitions
  • Manual Partitioning
  • Parallelism
• Plugins
• Release Notes
• Why another Go release tool?

Configuration

Configuration File

Hugoreleaser reads its main configuration from a file named hugoreleaser.yaml in the working directory. See this project's configuration for an annotated example.

Definitions

Hugoreleaser supports YAML anchors and aliases, and has a reserved section for definitions. This is useful for defining common settings that can be reused in multiple places, e.g.

definitions:
  archive_type_zip: &archive_type_zip
    type:
      format: zip
      extension: .zip

          - goarch: amd64
archives:
  - paths:
      - builds/**/windows/**
    archive_settings: *archive_type_zip

Archive Aliases

See Hugo's use here.

Template Expansion

Hugoreleaser supports Go template syntax in all fields with suffix _template (e.g. name_template used to create archive names).

The data received in the template (e.g. the ".") is:

Field	Description
Project	The project name as defined in config.
Tag	The tag as defined by the -tag flag.
Goos	The current GOOS.
Goarch	The current GOARCH.

In addition to Go's built-ins, we have added a small number of convenient template funcs:

• upper
• lower
• replace (uses strings.ReplaceAll)
• trimPrefix
• trimSuffix

With that, a name template may look like this:

name_template = "{{ .Project }}_{{ .Tag | trimPrefix `v` }}_{{ .Goos }}-{{ .Goarch }}"

Environment Variables

The order of presedence for environment variables/flags:

1. Flags (e.g. -tag)
2. OS environment variables.
3. Environment variables defined in hugoreleaser.env.

A hugoreleaser.env file will, if found in the current directory, be parsed and loaded into the environment of the running process. The format is simple, a text files of key-value-pairs on the form KEY=value, empty lines and lines starting with # is ignored:

Environment variable expressions in hugoreleaser.yaml on the form ${VAR} will be expanded before it's parsed.

An example hugoreleaser.env with the enviromnent for the next release may look like this:

HUGORELEASER_TAG=v1.2.3
HUGORELEASER_COMMITISH=main
MYPROJECT_RELEASE_NAME=First Release!
MYPROJECT_RELEASE_DRAFT=false

In the above, the variables prefixed HUGORELEASER_ will be used to set the flags when running the hugoreleaser commands.

The other custom variables can be used in hugoreleaser.yaml, e.g:

release_settings:
  name: ${MYPROJECT_RELEASE_NAME}

Note the special @U (Unquoute) syntax. The field draft is a boolean and cannot be quouted, but this would create ugly validation errors in TOML aware editors. The construct above signals that the quoutes (single or double) should be removed before doing any variable expansion.

Glob Matching

Hugo releaser supports the Glob rules as defined in Gobwas Glob with one additional rule: Glob patterns can be negated with a ! prefix.

The CLI -paths flag is a slice an, if repeated for a given prefix, will be ANDed together, e.g.:

hugoreleaser build  -paths "builds/**" -paths "!builds/**/arm64"

The above will build everything, expect the ARM64 GOARCH.

Partitions

Manual Partitioning

The configuration file and the (mimics the directory structure inside /dist) creates a simple tree structure that can be used to partition a build/release. All commands takes one or more -paths flag values. This is a Glob Path matching builds to cover or releases to release (the latter is only relevant for the last step). Hugo has partitioned its builds using a container name as the first path element. With that, releasing may look something like this:

# Run this in container1
hugoreleaser build --paths "builds/container1/**"
# Run this in container2, using the same /dist as the first step.
hugoreleaser build --paths "builds/container2/**"
hugoreleaser archive
hugoreleaser release

Parallelism

The build command takes the optional -chunks and -chunk-index which could be used to automatically split the builds to speed up pipelines., e.g. using Circle CI's Job Splitting.

See Hugo v0.102.0 Release Notes for more information.

Plugins

Hugoreleaser supports Go Module plugins to create archives. See the Deb Plugin for an example.

See the Hugoreleaser Plugins API for API and more information.

Release Notes

The config map release_notes_settings has 3 options for how to handle release notes:

1. Set a filename
2. Set generate_on_host=true and let GitHub do it.
3. Set generate=true and let Hugoreleaser do it.

There are more details about change grouping etc. in this this project's configuration.

For the third option, you can set a custom release notes template to use in template_filename. See the default template in staticfiles/templates/release-notes.gotmpl for an example.

Why another Go release tool?

This project was created because Hugo had some issues that seemed unsolvable with Goreleaser:

• We had a CI release that timed out a lot (1 hour). And since Goreleaser creates the tag as the first step, we often ended up having to delete the tag and start over, creating all sorts of issues.
• We wanted to add more build variants, but we couldn't.

Hugo has used this tool for all of its releases since v0.102.0, and the release time has gone down from 50-60 minutes to around 10 minutes.