Tidy Golang setup for CLI applications

Setting the GOPATH variable

Create the directory for your Go projects

Some people prefer having their Go projects in $HOME/go, I personally like to have my go projects in ~/projects/go. It keeps my $HOME cleaner.

To change the location of your Go projects, you’ll need to set the GOPATH enviroment variable:

Bash

Add this to your ~/.bashrc:

export GOPATH="~/projects/go"
export PATH="$PATH:~/projects/go/bin"

Fish

Add this to ~/.config/fish/config.fish:

  set -gx GOPATH /home/<username>/projects/go
  fish_add_path /home/<username>/projects/go/bin

the go/bin directory is used to access cobra-cli

Create a git repository for the CLI application

In this example, I’ll be using GitHub to host my code, to use any other platform replace github.com with the domain of the hosting platform (e.g. codeberg.org).

Clone the repo

  git clone git@github.com:username/name-of-cli.git

then cd name-of-cli

Initalize the module of your app

  go mod init github.com/username/name-of-cli

Configuring Cobra

Cobra provides a cobra-cli tool for generating all the necessary files you’ll need.

Install Cobra

  go install github.com/spf13/cobra-cli@latest

Because Cobra is a dependency of cobra-cli, you’ll only need to install the cobra-cli tool.

Initalize the Cobra application

  cobra-cli init

That’s it.