My New GitHub Action for Releasing Rust Projects

A while back I created a new GitHub Action for releasing Rust projects which produce binary releases (as opposed to crates). This works nicely with my Rust Cross Action to let me automate away most of the toil from releasing new versions of my Rust CLI tools like precious, ubi, and omegasort.

Using it is pretty simple and can be done in one step:

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- name: Publish artifacts and release
  uses: houseabsolute/actions-rust-release@v0
  with:
    executable-name: ubi
    target: x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

For a longer example, see how I use this action and my Rust Cross Action to build, test, and release ubi.

Right now, all it does is the following:

• Creates a tarball (most platforms) or zip file (Windows) with the executable, along with any extra files that are requested. By default, it will include a changes file (defaults to Changes.md) and anything matching README*.
• Creates a sha256 checksum file for this archive file.
• Uploads these two files as release artifacts for the workflow run in GitHub.
• Uses the GH Release Action to do the actual release publication on GitHub.

It’s not much, but I was copying the YAML config to do this between my Rust projects, so it made sense to turn this into its own standalone Action.

In the future, I might turn this into something a little more generic. The only Rust-specific piece of it is that it knows where to cargo build puts the executable file. But there’s no reason this couldn’t work just as well for any other language capable of producing single-file binaries, like Go.