Cobra Command Line using Go

The Go programming language is an open source project to make programmers more productive. In the following blog post I assume you already have the Go environment setup. Previously we have created a Hello World application. The next step is to create a command line application. The example below covers the basics of using Cobra

Go Installation

1. Confirm Go is installed

go version

If it is not installed check out a previous post to install Go in Linux

Development setup

With go already installed, the setup requires a couple more steps

• Create a directory for your code
• Initialise the location where the module can be found

1. Make the go home directory

   mkdir -p ~/hello_cobra && cd hello_cobra
   

2. Initialise the hello directory

go mod init github.com/rosera/hello_cobra

3. The directory should now look like this:

.
└── go.mod

Install Cobra

1. We can use Go to download and build a local Cobra binary

go get -u github.com/spf13/cobra/cobra

2. The binary for Cobra will now be available in the Go bin path.

3. The directory should now look like this:

.
├── go.mod
└── go.sum

Integrate Cobra

1. Add Cobra to the existing app

cobra init

2. The directory should now look like this:

.
├── cmd
│   └── root.go
├── go.mod
├── go.sum
├── LICENSE
└── main.go

3. Build the application

go build

4. The build command will produce an application based on the folder name

5. Run the code hello application

./hello_cobra

6. The application output should be as per below:

A longer description that spans multiple lines and likely contains
examples and usage of using your application. For example:

Cobra is a CLI library for Go that empowers applications.
This application is a tool to generate the needed files
to quickly create a Cobra application.