build-binaries-local.md

Local Binary Builds (Not for Git)

These notes walk through building standalone binaries for each supported platform without requiring Go on the target machine.

Prerequisites

• Go 1.21+ and the project dependencies installed on this machine.
• Poppler CLI tools (pdftotext, pdfinfo) available so you can test the Linux build; end users still need these tools, but not Go.

From the repo root (/home/han/Projects/go-pdf):

mkdir -p dist

Build Per Platform

1. Linux (amd64)

    CGO_ENABLED=1 GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 \
    go build -o dist/gorae-linux-amd64 ./cmd/gorae
   
    ./dist/gorae-linux-amd64 -help   # sanity-check

2. macOS (Intel)

    CGO_ENABLED=0 GOOS=darwin GOARCH=amd64 \
    go build -o dist/gorae-darwin-amd64 ./cmd/gorae

3. macOS (Apple Silicon)

    CGO_ENABLED=0 GOOS=darwin GOARCH=arm64 \
    go build -o dist/gorae-darwin-arm64 ./cmd/gorae

4. Windows (amd64)

    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install -y mingw-w64
   
    CGO_ENABLED=1 GOOS=windows GOARCH=amd64 \
    CC=x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc \
    go build -o dist/gorae-windows-amd64.exe ./cmd/gorae

Distribute

• Share the files inside dist/ that match each user's platform. Compress them if needed.
• Users copy the binary to a directory on their PATH (e.g., ~/.local/bin, /usr/local/bin, %USERPROFILE%\\bin) and run gorae -root /path/to/Papers.
• No Go toolchain required on the target system, but Poppler tools must be installed for metadata/text extraction features.

(Keep this file out of version control; see .gitignore.)