Can goreleaser run faster?

[tlimoncelli]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Can pr_build.yml be made faster?

goreleaser takes 8-12 minutes. It is now the slowest part of the PR CI/CD pipeline.

Describe the solution you'd like

Unsure what would make it faster.

Describe alternatives you've considered

I tried the "-p" (parallel) flag with various values. They all produced the same result. See https://github.com/StackExchange/dnscontrol/actions/workflows/pr_build.yml

Additional context
n/a

[cafferata]

I looked into this and the main bottleneck is the goreleaser build --snapshot step, which takes ~8m19s out of the total ~10m45s (run 23057743439).

Step	Duration
Unit tests	1m 46s
Build binaries (not tagged)	8m 19s
Rest (setup, cache, etc.)	~10s

Two things make it slow:

1. Cross-compilation for all 8 targets (linux, windows, darwin, freebsd x amd64/arm64). For a PR build, we only need to verify the code compiles.
2. Before hooks (go fmt ./..., go mod tidy, go generate ./...) run every time, but are redundant in CI -- formatting/tidy should already be done, and go generate is covered by the stringer install step.

Proposed fix:

args: build --snapshot --single-target --skip=before

• --single-target builds only for the runner's OS/arch (linux/amd64), skipping the other 7 targets
• --skip=before skips the redundant go fmt, go mod tidy, go generate hooks

This should bring the GoReleaser step from ~8 minutes down to ~1 minute. The full release build (on tag) would remain unchanged.

[cafferata]

Results are in from run 23105587930:

Step	Before	After	Difference
Build binaries (not tagged)	8m 19s	39s	-93%
Unit tests	1m 46s	1m 47s	-
Total	~10m 45s	~2m 52s	-73%

See PR #4167.