Book Image

Building Modern CLI Applications in Go

By : Marian Montagnino
Book Image

Building Modern CLI Applications in Go

By: Marian Montagnino

Overview of this book

Although graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are intuitive and user-friendly, nothing beats a command-line interface (CLI) when it comes to productivity. Many organizations settle for a GUI without searching for alternatives that offer better accessibility and functionality. If this describes your organization, then pick up this book and get them to rethink that decision. Building Modern CLI Applications in Go will help you achieve an interface that rivals a GUI in elegance yet surpasses it in high-performance execution. Through its practical, step-by-step approach, you’ll learn everything you need to harness the power and simplicity of the Go language to build CLI applications that revolutionize the way you work. After a primer on CLI standards and Go, you’ll be launched into tool design and proper framework use for true development proficiency. The book then moves on to all things CLI, helping you master everything from arguments and flags to errors and API calls. Later, you’ll dive into the nuances of empathic development so that you can ensure the best UX possible, before you finish up with build tags, cross-compilation, and container-based distribution. By the end of this UX book, you’ll be fully equipped to take the performance and flexibility of your organization’s applications to the next level.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started with a Solid Foundation
6
Part 2: The Ins and Outs of a CLI
10
Part 3: Interactivity and Empathic Driven Design
14
Part 4: Building and Distributing for Different Platforms

Part 4: Building and Distributing for Different Platforms

This part of the book is all about building, testing, and distributing your CLI application using Docker and GoReleaser. It starts by explaining the importance of building and testing, and how build tags with Boolean logic can be used to create targeted builds and testing to further stabilize your project with each new feature. The part also covers cross-compilation, a powerful feature of Go, which enables you to compile your application for different operating systems and architectures. The benefits of containerization are also explored, with a focus on Docker containers for testing and distributing your apps. Finally, we end with a discussion using GoReleaser and GitHub Actions in tandem to automate the release of a CLI application as a Homebrew formula, which makes it easy for MacOS users to find and install your software with just one command.

This part has the following chapters: