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
  - go generate ./...
  - go mod tidy
  - touch {{ .Env.FILE_TO_TOUCH }}

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

Pro Features

With GoReleaser Pro, things are a bit more flexible: you can specify the dir, enviroment variables and also global after hooks.

# .goreleaser.yml

# global before hooks
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

# global after hooks
after:
  # Templates for the commands to be ran.
  hooks:
  - make clean
  - cmd: cat *.yaml
    dir: ./submodule
  - cmd: touch {{ .Env.RELEASE_DONE }}
    env:
      RELEASE_DONE: '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.