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

Over the course of this chapter, you’ve learned about the os/exec package in depth. This included learning about the different ways to create commands: using the command struct or the Command method. Not only have we created commands, but we’ve also passed file descriptors to them to receive information back. We learned about the different ways to run a command using the Run or Start method and the multiple ways of retrieving data from the standard output, standard error types, and other file descriptors.

In this chapter, we also discussed the net/http and net/url packages, which are important to be comfortable with when creating HTTP requests to external API servers. Several examples taught us how to create requests with the methods on http.Client, including Do, Get, Post, and PostForm.

It’s important to learn how to build robust code, and handling errors gracefully is part of the process. We need to know how to capture errors first, so we discussed...