Strip and run UPX on executables

This action allows you to select an executable file which is then stripped and run through upx which drastically decreases the size of those executables. It runs on all operating systems types offered by GitHub.

Input variables

• file: The file you want to compress. It's compressed in-place. required
• args: Arguments to pass to UPX. optional
• strip: Whether or not "strip" symbols from object file (default true). optional
• strip_args: Arguments to pass to strip. optional

Usage

This Action is meant to be ran on just-compiled executables in the same CI job.

Simple example:

name: Publish

on:
  push:
    tags:
      - '*'

jobs:
  build:
    name: Publish binaries
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - name: Build
      run: cargo build --release --locked
    - name: Compress binaries
      uses: svenstaro/upx-action@v2
      with:
        file: target/release/mything

Complex example with more operating systems and inputs:

name: Publish

on:
  push:
    tags:
      - '*'

jobs:
  build:
    name: Publish binaries for ${{ matrix.os }}
    runs-on: ${{ matrix.os }}
    strategy:
      matrix:
        include:
          - os: ubuntu-latest
            file: target/release/mything
            args: --best --lzma
            strip: true
          - os: windows-latest
            file: target/release/mything.exe
            args: -9
            strip: false
          - os: macos-latest
            file: target/release/mything
            args: --best
            strip: true
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - name: Build
      run: cargo build --release --locked
    - name: Compress binaries
      uses: svenstaro/upx-action@v2
      with:
        file: ${{ matrix.file }}
        args: ${{ matrix.args }}
        strip: ${{ matrix.strip }}

Releasing and publishing

The instructions below are only relevant to maintainers of this Action.

• Sadly there's some manual work involved whenever lzma-native is updated. After running npm run all, it's necessary to fetch prebuilt binaries from https://node-pre-gyp.addaleax.net/lzma-native/ and extract the prebuilt bindings into node_modules/lzma-native. For the same reason, we can't use ncc as that only supports a single platform but we need to support all platforms at once!
• Make sure CHANGELOG.md is up-to-date.
• git tag -sm <version> <version>
• git push --tags
• Make a release at https://github.com/svenstaro/upx-action/releases/new and copy the CHANGELOG.md contents there.