goreleaser/www/docs/customization/hooks.md

title
Global Hooks

Some builds may need pre-build steps before building, e.g. go generate. The before section allows for global hooks which will be executed before the build is started.

The configuration is very simple, here is a complete example:

# .goreleaser.yml
before:
  # Templates for the commands to be ran.
  hooks:
  - make clean # simple string
  - cmd: go generate ./... # specify cmd
  - cmd: go mod tidy
    dir: ./submodule # specify command working directory
  - cmd: touch {{ .Env.FILE_TO_TOUCH }}
    env:
      FILE_TO_TOUCH: 'something-{{ .ProjectName }}' # specify hook level environment variables

If any of the hooks fails the build process is aborted.

In the same sense, you can also add global after hooks:

# .goreleaser.yml
after:
  # Templates for the commands to be ran.
  hooks:
  - make clean # simple string
  - cmd: go generate ./... # specify cmd
  - cmd: go mod tidy
    dir: ./submodule # specify command working directory
  - cmd: touch {{ .Env.FILE_TO_TOUCH }}
    env:
      FILE_TO_TOUCH: 'something-{{ .ProjectName }}' # specify hook level environment variables

!!! info Global after hooks is a GoReleaser Pro feature.

!!! tip Learn more about the name template engine.

Complex commands

If you need to do anything more complex, it is recommended to create a shell script and call it instead. You can also go crazy with sh -c "my commands", but it gets ugly real fast.