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

Packages for platform-independent functionality

When you are building a command-line interface (CLI) that will be shared with the public, it’s important that the code is platform-independent to support users who are running the CLI on different operating systems. Golang has supportive packages that provide platform-independent interfaces to operating system functionality. A few of these packages include os, time, and path. Another useful package is the runtime package, which helps when detecting the operating system the application is running on, among other things. We will review each of these packages with some simple examples to show how to apply some of the available methods.

The os package

The operating system (os) package has a Unix-like design but applies uniformly across all operating systems. Think of all the operating system commands you can run in a shell, including external commands. The os package is your go-to package. We discussed calling external commands...