Run System Commands & Binary Files

Oct 6, 2018 · 132 words · 1 minute read

#cmd #command #system #run #execute #output #binary

Within Go, like other languages, we have the ability to call external binaries. These allow us to do all sorts of things, but in our example we’re just going to print out our go version by calling our copy (located in /usr/local/go/bin on my computer).

The Command function within the os/exec package will allow us to do this. It accepts at least one string - the name of the command/binary you’re trying to run - followed by any number of strings for it’s parameters.

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package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "log"
    "os/exec"
)

func main() {

    // Print Go Version
    cmdOutput, err := exec.Command("go", "version").Output()
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }

    fmt.Printf("%s", cmdOutput)
}

How to Run a Single Test – Sep 24, 2019
Go has a simple command line for running its tests, with go test. However, often when writing tests you don’t care about the rest of the test suite - you just want to run your new test. This post shows you the command you need to run just your test, as well as a full example below.
Go Get: Install All Packages – Jun 7, 2019
Go has a simple built in way to download packages. If you’ve programmed in Go, you’ve likely used the go get command before (view docs). It often works something like this: go get -u github.com/gorilla/mux Which is great - but! What if you want to download all the packages linked to your project? This commonly happens if you pull a new project down using version control and don’t want to go get each package individually.
Disable Log Output During Tests – Jan 14, 2019
It’s quite common to use the log package within your code to keep track of things which the end user might not need to see, like deprecated notices and warnings. These are great when they are in production and you are monitoring the logs - but they will show up during your tests. Below is an example test for our example application (even further below) which just asserts that the result of the function is 5.

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Author: Edd Turtle

Edd is the Lead Developer at Hoowla, a prop-tech startup, where he spends much of his time working on production-ready Go and PHP code. He loves coding, but also enjoys cycling and camping in his spare time.

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