Setting up a matrix for GitHub Actions with Go's go.mod and specific versions
When you're building a library or set of tooling in Go, you may want to test against different versions of Go to give confidence in the project for both you and your users.
I set about doing this today for oapi-codegen, and found that I wanted to take the following configuration:
name: Build project
on: [ push, pull_request ]
jobs:
build:
name: Build
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Check out source code
uses: actions/checkout@v3
- name: Set up Go
uses: actions/setup-go@v3
with:
go-version-file: 'go.mod'
# ...
But I also wanted to specify that this should run against Go 1.21, without hardcoding 1.20 and 1.21 here, so I could use the go.mod as the guide for the version.
I came up with the following, somewhat complicated, setup:
name: Build project
on: [ push, pull_request ]
jobs:
build:
name: Build
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
strategy:
fail-fast: false
# perform matrix testing to give us an earlier insight into issues with different versions of supported major versions of Go
matrix:
# strategy is used to allow us to pin to a specific Go version, or use the version available in our `go.mod`
strategy: ['go-version']
version: [1.21]
include:
# pick up the Go version from the `go.mod`
- strategy: 'go-version-file'
version: 'go.mod'
steps:
- name: Check out source code
uses: actions/checkout@v3
- name: Set up Go
uses: actions/setup-go@v3
with:
${{ matrix.strategy }}: ${{ matrix.version }}
