GitHub Action to Release Rust Projects

This action helps you create GitHub Releases for Rust projects that produce an executable.

Here's an example from the release workflow for my tool precious:

jobs:
  release:
    name: Release - ${{ matrix.platform.release_for }}
    strategy:
      matrix:
        platform:
          - os_name: Linux-x86_64
            os: ubuntu-20.04
            target: x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

          - os_name: macOS-x86_64
            os: macOS-latest
            target: x86_64-apple-darwin

            # more release targets here ...

    runs-on: ${{ matrix.platform.os }}
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Build executable
        uses: houseabsolute/actions-rust-cross@v0
        with:
          target: ${{ matrix.platform.target }}
          args: "--locked --release"
          strip: true
      - name: Publish artifacts and release
        uses: houseabsolute/actions-rust-release@v0
        with:
          executable-name: ubi
          target: ${{ matrix.platform.target }}
        if: matrix.toolchain == 'stable'

What It Does

This action will do the following:

• Package an executable, along with any additional files you specify (defaults to README* and Changes.md). It will produce a tarball on all platforms but Windows, where it produces a zip file.
• Create a SHA256 checksum file for the tarball or zip file using shasum.
• Upload the archive and checksum files as artifacts for your workflow.
• If this action is called for a tag that matches the specified prefix (defaults to v), then it will also create/update a GitHub Release for this tag, attaching the archive and checksum files as release artifacts

If you have a matrix build that creates executables for many platforms, you should call this action for each platform. It should work on any platform supported by GitHub Actions (Linux, macOS, Windows).

Input Parameters

This action takes the following parameters:

executable-name

• Required: yes

The name of the executable that your project compiles to. In most cases, this is just the name of your project, like cross or mise.

release-tag-prefix

• Required: no
• Default: "v"

The prefix for release tags. The default is "v", so that tags like "v1.2.3" trigger a release.

target

• Required: no, if archive-name is provided.

The target triple that this release was compiled for. This should be one of the targets found by running rustup target list.

Either this input or the archive-name input must be provided.

archive-name

• Required: no, if target is provided

The name of the archive file to produce. This will contain the executable and any additional files specified in the files-to-package input, if any. If this isn't given, then one will be created based, starting with the executable-name and followed by elements from the target input.

Either this input or the target input must be provided.

extra-files

• Required: no

This is a list of additional files or globs to include in the archive files for a release. This should be provided as a newline-separate list.

Defaults to the file specified by the changes-file input and any file matching README* in the project root.

If you do specify any files, then you will need to also list the changes file and README explicitly if you want them to be included. The value passed in changes-files will be ignored in this case.

changes-file

• Required: no
• Default: "Changes.md"

The name of the file that contains the changelog for this project. This will be used to generate a description for the GitHub Release.

If you set this to an empty string, then no changelog file will be included.

working-directory

• Required: no
• Default: "."

The current working directory in which all actions are performed. This defaults to the checked out repo's root. You use relative paths to set this to a subdirectory in the repo.

Outputs

This action provides two outputs.

artifact-id

The ID of the workflow artifact that was created.

artifact-url

The URL of the workflow artifact that was created.