The cobra Package I

cobra is a very handy and popular Go package that allows us to develop command-line utilities with commands, subcommands, and aliases. If you have ever used hugo, docker, or kubectl, you are going to realize immediately what the cobra package does, as all these tools are developed using cobra. Commands can have one or more aliases, which is very handy when we want to please both amateur and experienced users. cobra also supports persistent flags and local flags, which are flags that are available to all commands and flags that are available to given commands only, respectively. Also, by default, cobra uses viper for parsing its command-line arguments.

All cobra projects follow the same development pattern. We use the cobra utility, then we create commands, and then we make the desired changes to the generated Go source code files in order to implement the desired functionality. Depending on the complexity of our utility, we might need to make lots of changes to the created files. Although cobra saves us lots of time, we still have to write the code that implements the desired functionality for each command.

Installation

We need to take some extra steps in order to download the cobra binary the right way: