Build Powerful Go CLI Applications Using the Cobra Package 🐍

Donald Feury -

Shout out to my wife who makes these hilarious thumbnails, follow her on Twitter for more art stuff.

CLI applications are extremely handy to use. Building out a lot of the nice features that good CLI apps have can be a bit time-consuming though.

At least, it was, until cobra was created and that changed everything.

Cobra is a go package that can be utilized to create very robust CLI applications with very little effort.

It provides an impressive list of features:

  • Subcommand-based CLIs
  • POSIX-compliant flags (short/long versions)
  • Nested subcommands
  • Global, local, and cascading flags (explained in the video)
  • Application and command generator
  • Auto suggestions on command typos
  • Automatic help generation
  • Automatic help flag recognition
  • Generates shell autocompletion for bash, zsh, fish, and Powershell
  • Generates documentation, such as man pages
  • Command aliases
  • Integrates very well with viper

Check out the video tutorial where I give some basic examples of the various features of cobra.

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