Pages on rmqa.com

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

rmqa.com is the home of rmqa, short for release manifest QA. It’s a small program that checks a software release before you publish it. You describe once what every release must contain, and rmqa opens the real archives and programs and tells you, file by file, what is missing or wrong.

Why It Exists

Build pipelines check that the code compiles and the tests pass. Almost nothing checks the finished release as a whole. So the mistakes that reach users are the boring ones: the arm64 archive holds the amd64 program, one download still has last week’s build inside, the macOS file was never uploaded, the checksums file was made before an archive was rebuilt, the license is missing from the Windows zip. Each step went green. The release is still wrong, and the first person to notice is a user filing an issue.

Contact

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

rmqa.com would like to hear from:

Anyone trying rmqa on a real release. What it caught, what it missed, and what you checked by hand before.
Anyone who found a bug. A good release that rmqa failed, a broken one it passed, an error message that didn’t make sense.
Anyone with an idea for a check rmqa should run, or an archive type it should open.

Write to info@rmqa.com.

Bug reports are also welcome on GitHub. It helps to include what rmqa version prints, your manifest, and the output of rmqa check --format json. Please don’t attach private release files: the rmqa inspect output for the archive in question is usually enough.

Download rmqa

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The rmqa command is one file with nothing else to install. Each archive below holds it with its license files. The links always point to the latest release.

System	Download
Linux, x86-64	rmqa_linux_amd64.tar.gz
Linux, ARM64	rmqa_linux_arm64.tar.gz
macOS, Apple silicon	rmqa_darwin_arm64.tar.gz
macOS, Intel	rmqa_darwin_amd64.tar.gz
Windows, x86-64	rmqa_windows_amd64.zip

Checksums are in SHA256SUMS. Every release is listed on GitHub.

Install

On Linux or macOS:

tar -xzf rmqa_linux_amd64.tar.gz
sudo mv rmqa /usr/local/bin/
rmqa version

The binaries are static, so they run on any Linux distribution. The macOS binaries aren’t signed by Apple, so macOS may block the first run; allow it in System Settings under Privacy & Security, or run xattr -d com.apple.quarantine rmqa. On Windows, unzip the archive and put rmqa.exe in a folder on your PATH.

GitHub Action

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

rmqa comes with a GitHub Action, so a workflow can check a release without downloading anything by hand. The action fetches the rmqa binary for the runner, runs rmqa check --format github, and fails the step when the release isn’t ready. Each problem shows up as an annotation on the run, and a summary table goes to the job summary.

The Short Version

- uses: softdevstudio/rmqa@v0.1.2
  with:
    dir: dist

Put it after the steps that build the release files and before the step that publishes them. If rmqa finds a problem, the publish step never runs.

Manifest Reference

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The manifest tells rmqa what every release must contain. It’s a small TOML file, rmqa.toml by default, kept next to your code. rmqa init writes a first version from a release you know is good; this page covers every setting, every command and every finding code.

An Example

This is the manifest rmqa uses for its own releases:

project = "rmqa"
version_file = "VERSION"     # or version = "1.4.2", or --version on the command line

[[platform]]
os = "linux"
arch = "amd64"

[[platform]]
os = "linux"
arch = "arm64"

[[platform]]
os = "darwin"
arch = "arm64"

[[platform]]
os = "darwin"
arch = "amd64"

[[platform]]
os = "windows"
arch = "amd64"               # archive = "zip" and exe = ".exe" are the Windows defaults

[[artifact]]
name = "rmqa_{os}_{arch}.{archive}"   # one archive per platform
binaries = ["rmqa{exe}"]              # the program inside, checked against the platform
files = ["LICENSE", "NOTICE", "THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.md", "README.md", "CHANGELOG.md"]
run = ["version"]                     # run it where it can run, and look for the version
min_size = 500000

[[artifact]]
name = "SHA256SUMS"
checksums = "sha256"                  # must list every other file, with the right hash

Platforms

Each [[platform]] needs os and arch in Go’s spelling (linux, darwin, windows, freebsd; amd64, arm64, 386, arm, riscv64, and universal for a macOS universal binary). Any other string in a platform becomes a template variable, so names that spell platforms their own way still fit:

Quick Start

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

rmqa checks a software release before you publish it. This page takes you from nothing to a checked release in a few minutes. The examples use a made-up command-line tool called tidy, built for five platforms.

1. Get the rmqa Command

Download the archive for your system from the download page, unpack it and put rmqa somewhere on your PATH. Check it works:

rmqa version

2. Write the Manifest From a Good Release

The manifest says what every release must contain. You can write it by hand, but the quick way is to point rmqa init at a release you know is good, such as the last one you published: