CI/CD for a C Library with Autotools and GitHub Actions

Configure, build, and test your Autotools C library on every push.

A C library using GNU Autotools follows the autoreconf, configure, make, make check flow and ships a versioned tarball via make dist. This recipe runs that flow and uploads the tarball.

What the pipeline does

install autotools and a compiler
bootstrap with autoreconf -i
configure with ./configure
build and test with make and make check
produce a tarball with make dist

The workflow

autoreconf -i regenerates the build system from configure.ac and Makefile.am; make distcheck additionally verifies the tarball builds and tests cleanly from a clean tree.

.github/workflows/ci.yml

name: CI
on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
  pull_request:
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y autoconf automake libtool build-essential
      - run: autoreconf -i
      - run: ./configure
      - run: make -j$(nproc)
      - run: make check
      - run: make distcheck
      - uses: actions/upload-artifact@v4
        with:
          name: dist-tarball
          path: '*.tar.gz'

Caching and speed

Cache apt packages or use ccache (cache ~/.ccache with actions/cache) to skip recompiling unchanged objects. distcheck is the slowest step because it builds twice; cheaper managed runners such as Latchkey keep these builds affordable and auto-retry transient apt-mirror failures.

Releasing

make dist produces a versioned package-X.Y.Z.tar.gz suitable for distro packaging. Attach it to a GitHub Release on tags so downstreams get a reproducible, configure-ready source tarball.

Key takeaways

autoreconf -i regenerates the build system from your *.ac/*.am files.
make distcheck verifies the tarball builds cleanly from scratch.
Ship the make dist tarball as the canonical release artifact.