Golang Package Version Flag

So you’ve built your first service using Go and have it deployed out into your production environment. With cross compiling built into Go it’s easy and almost trivial to build a new binary of your code and deploy updates.

But what happens when you need to know what version of your code is where or how can you easily verify your new binary was deployed.

There is a built in library in Go that handles flag parsing, the flag package. Using the flag package is straight forward and allows us to use flags to pass to our binary to print a version out.

First lets start with a main package that imports the flag package.

package main

import (
    "flag"
    "fmt"
)

func main() {
    flag.Parse()
    fmt.Println("Hello from main()")
}

If you have the file in your $GOROOT as main.go then run go build main.go and after running ./main you should see:

$ ./main
Hello from main()

So what did the flag.Parse() line do for us? Well it actually looked to parse any flags passed to the program. Since we did not pass anything it does not have to do any work here. Now lets add a version flag to parse so we can print the version of our program.

package main

import (
    "flag"
    "fmt"
    "os"
)

const AppVersion = "1.0.0 beta"

func main() {
    version := flag.Bool("v", false, "prints current app version")
    flag.Parse()
    if *version {
      fmt.Println(AppVersion)
      os.Exit(0)
    }
    fmt.Println("Hello from main()")
}

We first start by adding a definition of our version flag. It will be a boolean flag with a name of v, a default of false and a description of what our flag means. Next we call flag.Parse() to look for any flags passed into our program. After parsing our version variable will have a value if we passed a -v to our program when running it. Run your program again, this time passing in our -v flag, and you should see the version string printed out and the program exist.

Some things to try out:

  1. What happens if you don’t pass in the -v flag?
  • What is the difference if you change the default value for the flag from false to true?
  • If you pass a flag other than -v what is the output of the program?