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

Custom Builds and Testing CLI Commands

With any Golang application, you’ll need to build and test. However, it is increasingly important as the project and its user base grow. Build tags with Boolean logic give you the ability to create targeted builds and testing and further stabilize your project with each new feature.

Given a deeper understanding of build tags and how to use them, we will use a real-world example, the audio file CLI, to integrate levels (free and pro) and enable a profiling feature.

Build tags are not only used as input when building but also when testing. We will spend the latter half of this chapter on testing. We will learn specifically how to mock an HTTP client that our CLI is using, configure tests locally, write tests for individual commands, and run them. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics in detail:

  • What are build tags and how can you use them?
  • Building with tags
  • Testing CLI commands