Import pre-built binaries

{{< g_featpro >}}

It is also possible to import pre-built binaries into the GoReleaser lifecycle.

Reasons you might want to do that include:

• You want to build your binaries in different machines due to CGO
• You want to build using a pre-existing Makefile or other tool
• You want to speed up the build by running several builds in parallel in different machines

In any case, its pretty easy to do that now:

builds:
  - # Set the builder to prebuilt
    builder: prebuilt

    # When builder is `prebuilt` there are no defaults for goos, goarch,
    # goarm, gomips, goamd64 and targets, so you always have to specify them:
    goos:
      - linux
      - darwin
    goarch:
      - amd64
      - arm64
    goamd64:
      - v1

    # prebuilt specific options
    prebuilt:
      # Path must be the template path to the binaries.
      # GoReleaser removes the `dist` directory before running, so you will likely
      # want to put the binaries elsewhere.
      # This field is required when using the `prebuilt` builder.
      path: output/mybin_{{ .Os }}_{{ .Arch }}{{ with .Amd64 }}_{{ . }}{{ end }}/mybin

    # Use 'binary' to set the final name of your binary.
    # This is the name that will be used in archives et al.
    binary: bin/mybin

[!NOTE] You can think of prebuilt.path as being the "external path" and the binary as being the "internal path to binary".

This example config will import into your release pipeline the following binaries:

• output/mybin_linux_amd64_v1
• output/mybin_linux_arm64
• output/mybin_darwin_amd64_v1
• output/mybin_darwin_arm64

The other steps of the pipeline will act as if those were built by GoReleaser itself. There is no difference in how the binaries are handled.

[!NOTE] A cool tip here, specially when using CGO, is that you can have one .goreleaser.yaml file just for the builds, build each in its own machine with goreleaser build --single-target and have a second .goreleaser.yaml file that imports those binaries and release them. This tip can also be used to speed up the build process if you run all the builds in different machines in parallel.

[!WARNING] GoReleaser will try to stat the final path, if any error happens while doing that (e.g. file does not exist or permission issues), GoReleaser will fail.

[!WARNING] When using the prebuilt binary, there are no defaults for goos, goarch, goarm, gomips and goamd64. You'll need to either provide them or the final targets matrix.

If you'd like to see this in action, check this example on GitHub.