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

Build tags for targeted platforms

Built tags, or build constraints, can be used for many purposes, but in this section, we will be discussing how to use build tags to identify which files should be included in a package when building for specific operating systems. Build tags are given in a comment at the top of a file:

//go:build

Build tags are passed in as flags when running go build. There could be more than one tag on a file, and they follow on from the comment with the following syntax:

//go:build [tags]

Each tag is separated by a space. Suppose we want to indicate that this file will only be included in a build for the Darwin operating system, then we would add this to the top of the file:

//go:build darwin

Then when building the application, we would use something like this:

go build –tags darwin

This is just a super quick overview of how build tags can be used to constrain files specific to operating systems. Before we go into an implementation...