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

Basic calculator CLI using Cobra and Viper

Let us pull some of the pieces together and create a separate and simple CLI using the Cobra CLI framework and Viper for configuration. A simple idea that we can easily implement is a basic calculator that can add, subtract, multiply, and divide values. The code for this demo exists within the Chapter-4-Demo repository for you to follow along.

The Cobra CLI commands

The commands are created with the following cobra-cli command calls:

cobra-cli add add
cobra-cli add subtract
cobra-cli add multiply
cobra-cli add divide

Calling these commands successfully generates the code for each command, ready for us to fill in the details. Let us show each command and how they each are similar and different.

The add command

The add command, addCmd, is defined as a pointer to the cobra.Command type. Here, we set the fields for the command:

// addCmd represents the add command
var addCmd = &cobra.Command{
    Use...