27 Jul 2015

A list of Go libraries and tools I find useful.

• fatih/vimgo - amazing Vim plugin for Go - auto format and vet code, fix imports, syntax highlighting, and many other features
• spf13/viper - configuration for apps, using command line flags, ENVIRONMENT, json, etcd/consul. Good for general devops ‘munging’ scripts
• Jeffail/gabs - provides a dynamic language approach to JSON
• mitchellh/mapstructure - JSON decoding tools - varying structure, weakly typed fields, squashing arrays
• spf13/cast - safe and easy casting from one type to another in Go - useful for JSON, YAML, etc
• kr/pretty - pretty printing for Go values
• armon/go-metrics - for exporting performance and runtime metrics to external metrics systems (i.e. statsite, statsd)
• ryanuber/columnize - easy column formatted output for golang
• package terminal
  • support functions for dealing with terminals - raw mode, reading passwords, foreground colors
• Songmu/prompter - utility for easy prompting - Choose, Password, Prompt, etc
• gholt/brimtext - tools for working with text - tables, colours, etc

Snippets

fatalIfErr, fatalIfNotOk

// from https://github.com/FiloSottile/whosthere
func fatalIfErr(err error) {
  if err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
  }
}

// example
db, err := sql.Open("mysql", C.MySQL)
fatalIfErr(err)
fatalIfErr(db.Ping())

// also
func fatalIfNotOk(ok bool, msg string) {
    if !ok {
        log.Fatal("not ok: " + msg)
    }
}

runcmd

// run a command using the shell; no need to split args
// from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6182369/exec-a-shell-command-in-go
func runcmd(cmd string, shell bool) []byte {
    if shell {
        out, err := exec.Command("bash", "-c", cmd).Output()
        if err != nil {
            log.Fatal(err)
            panic("some error found")
        }
        return out
    }
    out, err := exec.Command(cmd).Output()
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }
    return out
}