Using Git Tags and GitHub Workflow

Using git tags is quite easy and can be useful in setting up a simple CI/CD like pipeline i.e. streamlining the process of packaging or deploying your code. First thing you need to do is to create a tag in your git repo, you do this by running git tag v0.1.2 where v0.1.2 is your tag name, usually a version number or some other more human friendly identifier than a commit hash. It doesn’t have to start with v, but it’s a common to do so. Any tag creation that you do takes place on your local machine until you push it to the remote repo with git push --tags.

This is a good reference point for your codebase that you can use yourself or refer others to, but let’s take it a step further and make use of GitHub workflows to automate some tasks when a tag is pushed. Start by creating a file in a directory .github/workflows in your repo, create them if they don’t exist. For example it can be .github/workflows/release.yml the filename doesn’t matter as long as you understand what it does.

Here’s a flow that creates a binary from a Go project and releases it as an asset which means it can be accessed in the “Releases” section of your repository. First block defines a trigger for the workflow, in this case it runs when a tag is pushed that starts with v. The jobs block defines the steps needed to achieve our goal of releasing a binary for my-project. The first two steps are pretty self-explanatory and make use of the official GitHub actions. Next we define how we want to build the binary. And the final step is to use a 3rd party action to release the binary where the file name is the most important parameter, but it can has other params if needed.

name: Build and Release Go Binaries

on:
  push:
    tags:
      - 'v*'

jobs:
  build:
    name: Build and Release Go Binaries
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v3

      - name: Set up Go
        uses: actions/setup-go@v4
        with:
          go-version: 1.23

      - name: Build Go Binary
        run: |
          mkdir -p dist
          GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build -o my-project-linux-amd64

      - name: Release
        uses: softprops/action-gh-release@v2
        with:
          files: |
            my-project-linux-amd64

Now git add, commit and push this file to your repo and you’re all set. Next time you tag a commit and push it the workflow will run and create a binary release asset.