Akshay Raj Gollahalli

Cookiecutter Template for Writing Go Command Line Interface

I have been developing a lot of Go language based CLIs and most of them have similar structure. And every time I start a new project I tend to rewrite the same structure. So, instead of doing that I copied the required code and turned in into a cookiecutter template 😎.

The repository is available at - github.com/akshaybabloo/go-cli-template.

This template is highly inspired by GitHub’s CLI.

Requirements

  1. Python 3.6+
    1. Install cookiecutter
  2. Go 1.16+

Usage

In your terminal type in

> cookiecutter https://github.com/akshaybabloo/go-cli-template

Then, follow the options on the terminal.

Once done, you will have to refactor the module path in go.mod to suit your project name, I usually have it as github.com/akshaybabloo/<project-name>.

Features

  1. Checks for updates once every 24 hours via GitHub API
  2. Uses Cobra package for CLI
  3. Factory based approach, functions are available on every command if needed
  4. Global debug flag - uses logrus
  5. Custom help output that also displays aliases
  6. Uses custom color that’s available via factory - uses color
  7. Default global configuration location - <user folder>/<project name>/config.yaml
    1. Disable colour usage globally

Packages Used

Built using great open-source packages:

  1. heredoc - Package heredoc provides the here-document with keeping indent
  2. GitHub CLI - GitHub command line tool package
  3. color - Colour package
  4. uuid - UUID generator
  5. go-version - A library for parsing and verifying versions and version constraints
  6. logrus - Structured, pluggable logging for Go.
  7. afero - Afero is a filesystem framework providing a simple, uniform and universal API interacting with any filesystem
  8. Cobra - Cobra is both a library for creating powerful modern CLI applications
  9. pflags - pflag is a drop-in replacement for Go’s flag package, implementing POSIX/GNU-style –flags
  10. testify - A toolkit with common assertions and mocks that plays nicely with the standard library
  11. YAML v3 - YAML support for the Go language

Conclusion

I hope this template is able to help you with your next project. Happy coding 😄.