cobra VS goreleaser

We can use the flag with --date or -date, Go already does the automatic check. We can make our entire boilerplate with this approach, but let's make it a little easier and use the Cobra CLI package.

In this tutorial, we'll walk through the process of creating a simple command-line tool similar to curl using Go and Cobra, a CLI library for Go.

I use https://github.com/spf13/cobra religiously for this kind of thing - it handles all the annoying corner cases of parsing flags, and also has an intuitive notion of subcommands (with basic usage/help text generated) for picking which task you want to run with positional arguments.

We recently chose cobra[1] to create a cli application. It comes with so many best practices already packaged like autocompletions, help texts etc. etc.

[1]: https://github.com/spf13/cobra

github.com/spf13/cobra

I looked at the docs: https://cobra.dev/ ... and there are only examples on how to add new flags.

For installing Cobra-CLI you can go to Cobraor run go install github.com/spf13/cobra-cli@latest in the terminal.

In my build phase, I compile the source to create a k3sup binary and I also run the binary to generate shell script completions. Give kudos to this functionality which comes from spf13/cobra Go library for CLIs.

NWA is a command-line tool built on cobra. Here's an overview of NWA's commands:

I also got my eyes on GoReleaser, which I will use in my (Go) projects.

With "xq", I went even further and automated the release process using GoReleaser. To publish a new release, the only thing I need is to create and push the Git tag. The corresponding GitHub Action will trigger a release process, and GoReleaser prepares the binaries and changelog based on declared conventions. The result has a high level of predictability, and no manual work is required.

Things I can't live without in a new Go project in no particular order:

- https://github.com/golangci/golangci-lint - meta-linter

- https://goreleaser.com - automate release workflows

- https://magefile.org - build tool that can version your tools

- https://github.com/ory/dockertest/v3 - run containers for e2e testing

- https://github.com/ecordell/optgen - generate functional options

- https://golang.org/x/tools/cmd/stringer - generate String()

- https://mvdan.cc/gofumpt - stricter gofmt

- https://github.com/stretchr/testify - test assertion library

- https://github.com/rs/zerolog - logging

- https://github.com/spf13/cobra - CLI framework

FWIW, I just lifted all the tools we use for https://github.com/authzed/spicedb

We've also written some custom linters that might be useful for other folks: https://github.com/authzed/spicedb/tree/main/tools/analyzers

Goreleaser is nice. https://goreleaser.com/

I use goreleaser for packaging my binaries. I'm not currently doing RPM, but it does a lot of services and if you don't hunker down on a single solution, it might help with keeping your releases up to date/in sync.

There's some packaging issues, for example, we've always wanted to publish deb/rpm packages, but never got around to adding it to either promu or completely switching our build tooling over to GoReleaser.