Building Releases

In adherence to GO Shortener's zero-compile deployment model, all production binaries are compiled and verified inside GitHub Actions rather than on destination servers.

The Build Pipeline (.github/workflows/release.yml)

When a version tag (e.g., v1.0.0) is pushed to GitHub, the workflow automatically:

1. Runs the test suite (go test -v ./...).
2. Syncs frontend assets into backend/internal/embedded/public.
3. Cross-compiles standalone binaries for linux/amd64 and linux/arm64.
4. Computes SHA-256 checksums into checksums.txt.
5. Publishes a GitHub Release containing the binaries and helper scripts.

Manual Local Compilation

To manually compile release binaries on your development workstation:

# 1. Sync embedded frontend assets
mkdir -p backend/internal/embedded/public
cp -r frontend/public/* backend/internal/embedded/public/

# 2. Build for Linux x86_64 (amd64)
cd backend
CGO_ENABLED=0 GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build -ldflags="-s -w" -o ../dist/go-shortener-linux-amd64 ./cmd/server/main.go

# 3. Build for Linux ARM64 (aarch64)
CGO_ENABLED=0 GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm64 go build -ldflags="-s -w" -o ../dist/go-shortener-linux-arm64 ./cmd/server/main.go

Triggering a GitHub Release

Create and push a Git tag to trigger the cloud release workflow:

git tag v1.0.0
git push origin v1.0.0

Once the workflow finishes (typically under 2 minutes), prebuilt binaries will be available on the GitHub repository releases tab.