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

Summary

In this chapter, you learned what the GOOS and GOARCH environment variables are and how you can use them, as well as build tags, to customize builds based on the operating system, architecture, and levels. These environment variables help you to learn more about the environment you’re building in and possibly understand why a build may have trouble executing on another platform.

There are also two ways to compile an application – building or installing. In this chapter, we discussed how to build or install the application and what the difference is. The same flags are available for each command, but we discussed how to build or install on each of the major operating systems using the Makefile. However, this also showed how large the Makefile can become!

Finally, we learned how to create a simple script to run in Darwin, Linux, or Windows to generate all the builds needed for all the major operating systems. You learned how to write both a bash and PowerShell...