Fixing goreleaser error: failed to publish artifacts .. already_exists

TL;DR: If you have the same issue as I did, then you are not restricting the goreleaser action to tags, and you trigger the same release from the main branch and the git tag.

computers on a race track

Today I tried to release a new version of godu and the release action failed 💥.

  ⨯ release failed after 2m18s
    error=scm releases: failed to publish artifacts:
    failed to upload godu_1.4.0_Linux_arm64.tar.gz after 1 tries:
    POST https://uploads.github.com/repos/viktomas/godu/releases/83296480/assets?name=godu_1.4.0_Linux_arm64.tar.gz:
    422 Validation Failed [{Resource:ReleaseAsset Field:name Code:already_exists Message:}]

After some searching, I found this GitHub issue [Bug]: publishing multiple artifacts broken, which explained the problem.

In my release action, I don’t restrict where the action is run (tags, branches, PRs). I do that on purpose. I’m taking advantage of the following goreleaser behaviour:

When you trigger release action on a commit without a tag, goreleaser runs in a snapshot mode. It still validates that the release action works but it doesn’t publish the release.

The goreleaser GitHub action recommends to run it only on tags:

on:
  push:
    tags:
      - '*'

But that way, I would lose the release verification on non-tag builds.

I caused the issue by pushing both the tag and the main branch at the same time, triggering two identical release actions.

My solution is pragmatic: first push the main branch, wait for the green build and then push the tag.