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

Cobra – a library for building modern CLI applications

Cobra is a Go library for building powerful and modern CLI applications. It makes defining both simple and complex nested commands easy. The extensive field list for the Cobra Command object allows you to access the complete self-documenting help and man pages. Cobra also offers some fun additional benefits, including intelligent shell autocomplete, CLI scaffolding, code generation, and integration with the Viper configuration solution.

The Cobra library provides a much more powerful command structure than one written from scratch. As mentioned, there are many advantages to using the Cobra CLI, so we will dive into a few examples to exhibit its power. Starting a CLI with Cobra from scratch only requires three steps. First, make sure that cobra-cli is properly installed. Create a new folder for your project and follow these steps in sequence to set up your new CLI:

  1. Change directories into your project folder, audiofile...