Contributing

By participating in this project, you agree to abide our code of conduct.

Set up your machine

goreleaser is written in Go.

Prerequisites:

• Task
• Go 1.26+

Other things you might need to run some of the tests (they should get automatically skipped if a needed tool isn’t present):

• cosign
• Docker
• GPG
• Podman
• Snapcraft
• Syft
• upx

Building

Clone goreleaser anywhere:

git clone [email protected]:goreleaser/goreleaser.git

cd into the directory and install the dependencies:

go mod tidy

You should then be able to build the binary:

go build -o goreleaser .
./goreleaser --version

Testing your changes

You can create a branch for your changes and try to build from the source as you go:

task build

When you are satisfied with the changes, we suggest you run:

task ci

Before you commit the changes, we also suggest you run:

task fmt

A note about Docker multi-arch builds

If you want to properly run the Docker tests, or run goreleaser release --snapshot locally, you might need to setup Docker for it. You can do so by running:

task docker:setup

A note about Windows

Make sure to enable “Developer Mode” in Settings.

Writing pipes

Pipes should follow these conventions for consistent error output:

• Do not prefix error messages with the pipe name. Error wrapping with the pipe name is done at the meta-pipe level (publish, announce, defaults), so individual pipes should only describe the problem itself (e.g., "no archives found" instead of "archive: no archives found").
• Use the pipe’s String() method for context. Meta-pipes wrap errors using fmt.Errorf("%s: %w", pipe.String(), err), which provides consistent, non-redundant context.

Creating a commit

Commit messages should be well formatted, and to make that “standardized”, we are using Conventional Commits.

You can follow the documentation on their website.

Submitting a pull request

Push your branch to your goreleaser fork and open a pull request against the main branch.

Financial contributions

You can contribute in our OpenCollective or to any of the contributors directly. See this page for more details.