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

Using GOOS and GOARCH

When developing your command-line application, it is important to maximize the audience by developing for as many platforms as possible. However, you may also want to target just a particular set of operating systems and architectures. In the past, it was much more difficult to deploy to platforms that differed from the one you were developing on. In fact, developing on a macOS platform and deploying it on a Windows machine involved setting up a Windows build machine to build the binary. The tooling would have to be synchronized, and there would be other deliberations that made collaborative testing and distribution cumbersome.

Luckily, Golang has solved this by building support for multiple platforms directly into the language’s toolchain. As discussed in Chapter 7, Developing for Different Platforms, and Chapter 11, Custom Builds and Testing CLI Commands, we learned how to write platform-independent code and use the go build command and build tags...