~/Golang CLI Tools Overview

Jul 8, 2019

Golang excels at building command-line interface tools CLI due to its static binary generation, speed, and ease of deployment.

Popular CLI Tool Libraries

• Cobra provides full-featured CLI applications with subcommands, flag parsing, and help generation
• urfavecli is a simple API for building CLI apps, suitable for small to medium projects
• pflag is a drop-in replacement for Go flag package with GNU flag syntax

Basic Example Using Cobra

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package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "github.com/spf13/cobra"
)

func main() {
    var rootCmd = &cobra.Command{
        Use:   "example",
        Short: "A simple example CLI",
        Run: func(cmd *cobra.Command, args []string) {
            fmt.Println("Hello CLI")
        },
    }
    rootCmd.Execute()
}

Useful Features

• Flags for input parameters
• Nested subcommands
• Auto completion and help text generation

Benefits

Golang compiles to static binaries ideal for distribution. Its strong concurrency model and easy cross-compilation help for performant and portable CLI tools.

Further reading: Effective Go: Command Line.