trans / goat

Know what you need? It's a Goat!

Goat

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Know what you need? It's a Goat.

Goat is simple helper tool for Go developers who do not want to be confined to a Go workspace.

Usage

Instead of go, use goat in the very same manner. That's pretty much all there is to it, but read "How It Works" below to fully understand why.

Goat can work with old-school workspaces as long as a .go file is added to the workspace's root directory, so, personally, I alias go to goat in my .profile or .bashrc file, and just go from there, i.e.

    alias go=goat

How It Works

Goat searches up the directory heirarchy for a .go file. When it finds this file, it prepends it's locatation to $GOPATH, passes the command off to go and restores the old $GOPATH when the go tool is finished.

To utilize Goat your project needs to be organized like a miniture private workspace. i.e.

bin/
pkg/
src/
  mydomain.org/
    myapp/
      mycode.go

To make coding a bit more pleasent link lib to your projects source.

$ ln -s src/mydomain.org/myapp lib

So then your project looks like this:

bin/
lib/ -> mydomain.org/myapp/
pkg/
src/
  mydomain.org/
    myapp/

And you can edit the code via the more accessible lib directory.

Conversely you can ln -s lib mydomain.org/myapp instead, if you wish. It should work the same either way.

Coming Soon

The next version of our friendly Goat will utilize the .go file more project metadata. In paritcular project dependencies, with which the goat will be able to install them all in one fell swoop! And maybe we'll find a few other nice things for the goat to do.

Caveats

Perhaps it would be nice if the projects *.go source code files could be in the toplevel directory, like it is for projects that use a workspace, but linking src/mydomain.org/myapp to ../../.. (the project's root), well, that might prove problematic given all the other content. But please let me know I am wrong about that!

Copyrights

(c) 2013 Open Bohemians, FreeBSD License