Automatically generate binstubs for the tools in your golang project

go-tools-binstubs is a nearly zero-configuration way to generate project binstubs that run the correct version of a go command tracked in your go.mod file.

1. Create a tools.yaml file that looks like this, pointing to the executable program path for each dependency:

package: tools
global_go_run_modifiers:
  - '-x'
build_tags:
  - tools
  - ignore
output_go_file_path: tools.go
output_binstubs_directory_path: bin
tools:
  - package: github.com/jcmfernandes/go-tools-binstubs
    ignore: false
    binstub: go-tools-binstubs
    go_run_modifiers:
      - '-work'
    override_global_go_run_modifiers: false
    binstub_modifiers:
      - '-help'

Or run go run github.com/jcmfernandes/go-tools-binstubs -gentemplate tools.yaml to quickly generate a YAML template.

2. Run go run github.com/jcmfernandes/go-tools-binstubs -input tools.yaml to create corresponding shell scripts in output_binstubs_directory_path (defaults to bin) and go file in output_go_file_path (defaults to tools.go).

It's a good practice to create a separate go.mod file for your project's tool. Let's say you have the following project setup:

.
├── go.mod
├── go.sum
├── internal
│   └── tools
│       ├── go.mod
│       ├── tools.yaml
│       └── go.sum
└── main.go

And you want it to look like the following:

.
├── bin
│   └── a-tool
├── go.mod
├── go.sum
├── internal
│   └── tools
│       ├── go.mod
│       ├── tools.yaml
│       ├── tools.go
│       └── go.sum
└── main.go

You'll have to change your binstubs -modfile to ./internal/tools/go.mod to make this work. Since you don't want to hardcode paths in your binstubs (you want them to work on everyone's machine), every binstub ships with bash variable binstubAbsParentDirectory that contains the runtime absolute path to the binstubs parent directory. You can use it to change your binstubs -modfile:

package: tools
global_go_run_modifiers:
  - '-modfile=${binstubAbsParentDirectory}/../internal/tools/go.mod'
output_binstubs_directory_path: "../../bin"
tools:
  - package: github.com/jcmfernandes/go-tools-binstubs

And voilà!

go-tools-binstubs started as a fork of binstubs.