Version 0.3.0 (2023-09-27)

Release Notes

This release is a big overhaul of cargo-dist's UX! Our CI scripts have been completely redesigned to allow your release process to be tested in pull-requests, so you don't have to worry as much about your release process breaking!

Since we can now test your release process frequently, we've also made most cargo-dist commands default to erroring out if anything is out of sync and needs to be regenerated.

To make this easier, we've also introduced an experimental new system for user-defined hooks, allowing you to write custom publish jobs without having to actually edit release.yml.

This release also introduces initial support for msi installers with the wonderful help of cargo-wix!

Features

CI redesign

This is the big ticket item of the release, the CI has been completely redesigned! We recommend reading the docs below for details, but some high-level details:

• The CI now runs cargo dist plan on pull-requests

• This can be cranked up to cargo dist build, with results uploaded to the PR workflow, allowing you to download+test them

• To do this, we now use GitHub's upload-artifact/download-artifact system, instead of using a draft GitHub release as scratch storage

• This means we also no longer create a draft Release on startup, and instead transactionally create the full Release at the very end

• cargo dist plan will now check that the CI script is up to date and not hand-edited (can be opted out)

  • The user-defined publish jobs feature helps you avoid hand-edits
  • More such features are in the pipeline for the next release!

• impl

  • @mistydemeo + @Gankra initial impl
  • @Gankra cleanup init logic
  • @mistydemeo use checkout@v4
  • @mistydemeo add docs

• docs

  • high-level summary
  • detailed docs

user-defined publish jobs

You can now define custom hand-written publish jobs that cargo-dist's CI will know how to invoke, without actually having to hand-edit release.yml!

• @mistydemeo impl
• docs

default to not publishing prereleases to homebrew

Homebrew doesn't have a notion of package "versions", there is Only The Latest Version, so we changed the default to only publishing to your homebrew tap if you're cutting a stable release. You can opt back in to the old behaviour with publish-prereleases = true.

• @mistydemeo impl
• docs

generate command

This feature is a bit of an internal affair that you don't necessarily need to care about, but it's big enough that we figured it's worth mentioning.

The "plumbing" generate-ci command which is invoked by cargo dist init has been reworked into a more general generate command, as the introduction of msi installers means we now have two kinds of checked-in generated output.

Most notably, generate --check now exists, which produces an error if generate would change the contents (ignoring newline-style). Most cargo-dist commands now run generate --check on startup, making it an error to have your release.yml out of date or hand-edited. This is a key piece to the puzzle of the new CI design, as it lets you catch issues with your release process in PRs.

The allow-dirty = ["ci"] config was introduced to disable these generate modifying or checking release.yml, for users that still really need to hand-edit. We're actively working on several features that should make it less necessary to do hand-edits.

• impl
  • @mistydemeo initial impl
  • @Gankra generalize for msi
  • @Gankra improved --allow-dirty behaviour
  • @mistydemeo default to --artifacts=all in generate
  • @Gankra ignore newline style when checking file equality
  • @mistydemeo hide generate-ci alias command
  • @Gankra cleanup more references to generate-ci
• docs
  • generate cli command
  • allow-dirty config

msi installer

Initial msi installer support is here, based on the wonderful cargo-wix. We contributed several upstream improvements to cargo-wix for our purposes, and look forward to helping out even more in the future!

• impl
  • @Gankra initial impl
  • @Gankra properly handle multiple subscribers to a binary
  • @Gankra don't forward WiX output to stdout
• docs

Fixes

more useful checksum files

The checksum files we generate are now in the expected format for tools like sha256sum, making them more immediately useful.

• @Gankra impl

Maintenance

more polished cli output

CLI Output has been streamlined and cleaned up a lot in this release!

• @Gankra remove redundant output
• @Gankra various improvements
• @Gankra better help diagnostics

refreshed docs

The docs have been significantly reworked to reflect how much cargo-dist has changed and improved over the last few releases. Installers have rapidly grown from "something we're trying out" to "the star of the show", so they're now front-and-center with room for their own guides.

This was a big undertaking, and not everything has been reworked yet. Further improvements will be done more incrementally.

• @Gankra big docs overhaul
• @mistydemeo don't suggest --profile in install instructions
• @tshepang make search more useful
• @tshepang remove stray char

Install cargo-dist 0.3.0

Install prebuilt binaries via shell script

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/axodotdev/cargo-dist/releases/download/v0.3.0/cargo-dist-installer.sh | sh

Install prebuilt binaries via powershell script

irm https://github.com/axodotdev/cargo-dist/releases/download/v0.3.0/cargo-dist-installer.ps1 | iex

Install prebuilt binaries via Homebrew

brew install axodotdev/homebrew-tap/cargo-dist

Download cargo-dist 0.3.0

File	Platform	Checksum
cargo-dist-aarch64-apple-darwin.tar.xz	macOS Apple Silicon	checksum
cargo-dist-x86_64-apple-darwin.tar.xz	macOS Intel	checksum
cargo-dist-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip	Windows x64	checksum
cargo-dist-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz	Linux x64	checksum