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Powerful Command-Line Applications in Go

Increasing Flexibility with Environment Variables

Explore how to increase the flexibility of your Go CLI applications by implementing environment variables. Understand how to use Go's os package to read environment variables and allow users to configure options like file names without repetitive command flags. This lesson guides you through updating your to-do tool to adapt dynamically based on environment settings, making it more customizable and user-friendly.

We'll cover the following...

With all the improvements we’ve made to our to-do tool so far, we’ve provided our users with several useful features. But the user still can’t select which file to save to the list of to-do items. We could use different approaches in this situation, such as adding another flag to allow the user to specify the file name, but another way to make our tool more flexible is by using environment variables.

Using environment variables

Using environment variables allows our users to just specify options once in their shell ...