[Devin T. Currie (DTCurrie)]

Attaches desktop app bundles for macOS, Linux and Windows to every GitHub release, so the Viam CLI has a fixed place and a fixed name pattern to download the visualizer from. This is phase 4 of the CLI launch effort, and phase 5 adds the CLI-side download into ~/.viam/visualizer/.

Desktop shell

• tauri-release.yml is a workflow_call and workflow_dispatch workflow with a four-leg matrix: aarch64-apple-darwin, x86_64-apple-darwin, x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu on ubuntu-22.04, and x86_64-pc-windows-msvc. Each leg runs tauri-apps/tauri-action@v0 against the existing v<version> release with releaseDraft: false, so it never drafts a second release. main.yml calls it after deploy-and-publish when published == 'true', next to bump-app-catalog. The dispatch form takes a tag to backfill or retry a release without a new npm publish.
• Asset names follow viam-visualizer-[version]-[platform]-[arch][setup][ext] through releaseAssetNamePattern. Every leg passes --target <triple>, because tauri-action takes [arch] from the triple when one is given and from Node's process.arch otherwise. The result is darwin | linux | windows and aarch64 | x86_64, which the CLI can derive from GOOS and GOARCH.
• A step on the macOS legs tars Viam Visualizer.app as viam-visualizer-<version>-darwin-<arch>.app.tar.gz and uploads it with gh release upload. That tarball is what the CLI will install. The Windows leg sets uploadPlainBinary so the portable .exe lands next to the NSIS -setup.exe.
• A final checksums job downloads every viam-visualizer-* asset and uploads checksums.txt in sha256sum format.
• tauri-check.yml runs on PRs that touch src-tauri/**, package.json, pnpm-lock.yaml or itself: cargo fmt --check, cargo clippy -D warnings, cargo test, then tauri build --debug --bundles app on macOS.
• tauri.conf.json sets bundle.macOS.signingIdentity to "-", so the bundle is codesigned ad-hoc rather than only linker-signed.
• README documents the asset names and the Gatekeeper right-click for ad-hoc builds.

Why?

Why a tar step instead of Tauri's .app.tar.gz updater artifact?

Tauri only emits .app.tar.gz with createUpdaterArtifacts, which requires an updater signing key and ships .sig files we have no consumer for. The CLI owns install and update, so a plain tarball under the shared name pattern is enough.

Why --target on every leg when each runner builds its host anyway?

Without it, tauri-action names the arch arm64 or x64. With it, the names are aarch64 and x86_64 on every platform, and the CLI can build the asset name from (version, GOOS, GOARCH) without listing the release.

Why ad-hoc signing?

There is no Apple Developer ID in the repo secrets yet. Ad-hoc signing keeps the bundle runnable on Apple Silicon after a right-click Open. Swapping in a certificate later is a secret plus two inputs on the macOS legs.

Why a separate tauri-check.yml instead of a job in pullrequest.yml?

The path filter belongs at the on: level so the macOS runner never spins up for a PR that does not touch the desktop shell. pullrequest.yml runs on every PR.

Testing

Ran actionlint over the three workflow files and pnpm lint. Ran the tarball and checksum shell steps locally against the current macOS bundle: they produced viam-visualizer-2.8.2-darwin-aarch64.app.tar.gz and a checksums.txt with one line per asset.

Not verified: a CI run of the release matrix. After merge, a workflow_dispatch of tauri-release.yml with tag: v2.8.2 backfills the current release and exercises all four legs, the tarball step and the checksums job before the next changesets publish depends on them.

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2026-10-21 20:58 UTC