CGO¶

Compiling with CGO is tricky, especially when cross-compiling. It requires extra setup and won't work "out of the box".

Here are a few ways you can do it with GoReleaser:

GoReleaser Pro¶

If you have GoReleaser Pro, you can use the split and merge feature to build for each platform natively and merge the builds later.

This is the recommended approach as it's the simplest and most reliable.

Check this article for an example, and the documentation here.

Using Docker¶

Another option is to use a Docker image with the required cross-compilers. This project provides the Docker images with a bunch of ready-to-use cross-compilers as well as how-to make a sysroot. All that wrapped into this example.

Using Zig¶

In some cases, you can use Zig to act as a C/C++ compiler, which makes cross-compilation with CGO easier.

You can find an example of this approach in this repository.

This might not work for all cases, but it's a good alternative to explore.

Community tools¶

Tools like xgo are not natively supported, and we make no promises about whether or how well they work within GoReleaser or not.