Makefile for Go projects

This is an example of Makefile to build a Go project. This is quite similar to Filippo Valsorda's hellogopher.

This is for people who don't know about GOPATH or who don't want to use it (like me). With such a Makefile, a project can be built whatever its location on the disk. Note however the use of symlinks is frowned upon by Go authors and some tools refuse to work with them.

This is intended for programs only. For libraries, you should be able to use go build, go install, go get directly or you will make the life of your users difficult.

Also, it is not intended to be an universal Makefile. It should stay basic to stay easy to understand.

Dependencies

This example relies on modules to retrieve dependencies. This require use of Go 1.11. To update a dependency, just edit go.mod. If you don't want to set a specific version, use go get -u DEPENDENCY@REVISION.

For older versions of Go, it's possible to use vgo instead:

go get -u golang.org/x/vgo
make GO=$GOPATH/bin/vgo

On first build, you need to run go mod init PROJECTNAME.

Versioning

Version is extracted from git tags using anything prefixed by v.

Usage

The following commands are available:

• make help to get help
• make to build the binary (in bin/)
• make build-docker build the docker image
• make test to run tests
• make test-verbose to run tests in verbose mode
• make test-race for race tests
• make test-xml for tests with xUnit-compatible output
• make test-coverage for test coverage (will output index.html, coverage.xml and profile.out in test/coverage.*/.
• make test PKG=helloworld/hello to restrict test to a package
• make clean
• make lint to run golint
• make fmt to run gofmt

The very first line of the Makefile is the most important one: this is the path of the package. I don't use a go getable package path but you can.

Be sure to browse the remaining of the Makefile to understand what it does. There are some tools that will be downloaded. You can use already-installed one by specifying their full path this way instead:

make lint GOLINT=/usr/bin/golint

Files other than .gitignore and Makefile are just examples.

License

This Makefile is published under the CC0 1.0 license. See LICENSE for more details.