novelist

README

Novelist

Capture your thoughts and ideas for your next book or story from the command line.

Installation

Binary

Grab the latest binary for your system.

Go

Just install it with go:

go install github.com/Morfo-si/novelist@latest

Build (requires Go 1.20+)

git clone https://github.com/Morfo-si/novelist.git
cd novelist
go build

Or, to build with the version string injected from the VERSION file:

make build
./novelist --version

Releasing

Releases are fully automated through GitHub Actions and GoReleaser. Pushing a v* tag triggers a workflow that cross-compiles binaries for Linux, macOS and Windows (amd64 + arm64), uploads them to a new GitHub Release, and generates a changelog from the commits since the previous tag.

Cutting a release

1. Bump the version. Edit the VERSION file — it holds a single semver string (e.g. 0.0.7). Do not prefix it with v; the Makefile and workflow add that for you.

2. Commit and push to main.

   git add VERSION
   git commit -m "chore: bump version to $(cat VERSION)"
   git push origin main
   

   Wait for the PR Checks workflow to go green.

3. Tag and push.

   make tag
   

   This runs git tag -a v$(cat VERSION) -m "Release v$(cat VERSION)" and pushes the tag to origin. The Release workflow fires on the tag push and publishes the release within a couple of minutes.

Pre-releases

Any tag containing a pre-release identifier (e.g. v0.1.0-beta.1, v1.0.0-rc.1) is automatically marked as a pre-release on GitHub. To cut one, set VERSION to 0.1.0-beta.1 and run the same flow.

Dry-running the release locally

Before tagging, you can exercise the entire GoReleaser pipeline locally without publishing anything:

make snapshot

This runs goreleaser release --snapshot --clean --skip=publish. Artifacts land in ./dist/ so you can inspect the archives, checksums and filenames.

What gets published

Each release contains:

• Binaries for linux/amd64, linux/arm64, darwin/amd64, darwin/arm64, windows/amd64, windows/arm64 (tar.gz for Unix, zip for Windows).
• checksums.txt — SHA-256 sums for every archive.
• Auto-generated changelog (commits prefixed with chore:, docs:, test: and merge commits are filtered out).

Commit message hints

The changelog is built from commit subjects. To keep releases readable, prefer Conventional Commits style prefixes — feat:, fix:, refactor: show up in the changelog; chore:, docs:, test: are hidden.

Documentation

Overview

Package main is the entry point for the Novelist program.