Ask HN: A Good Makefile for Go?

8 points·tmaly··7 comments

can someone suggest a good Makefile for Go projects?

A coworker of mine landed on a skeleton that seems to work for him. I'm not entirely sold on the choice of libraries, but it's a good starting point if your goal is to go from source code to a deployable binary (we use CentOS so it builds you an RPM) with sensible choices for logging and testing.

https://github.com/blalor/go-template

This[1] is what I used for a toy project of mine. Nothing fancy though, and probably not what you're looking for but could at least prompt some ideas.

[1] https://github.com/renstrom/go-wiki/blob/master/Makefile

You don't need a makefile for go. Generally all you need are "go build" "go install" "go test". If you have some generated source you can now used "go generate".

I use those now, but I want to setup some other ideas such as prompting for the database username/password to write into a config.go before compiling. I did not want to store information like this in a public git repo

I suggest that instead of compiling it into the binary, that you use environment variables instead. Or make it command line flags.

Then you can have a bash script that you don't check in that executes the variable with environment variables/ flags.

That doesn't cover non-go files though.

Thanks for the suggestions, I ended up taking a simple Makefile and calling a sub shell to a perl script to change placeholders in a config.go with my environment variables on the default target if they were not already set in config.go

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