Comparing Cobra to Alternatives
Understand the strengths of Cobra for building structured command-line programs in Go by comparing it with Go's built-in flag package and other third-party parsing libraries. Learn how to install and use Cobra, examine its application generator, and evaluate alternatives to make informed choices for your CLI projects.
We'll cover the following...
We will compare Cobra with some alternatives ways to parse command-line programs including the built-in ways Go provides as well as other third-party command-line parsing solutions.
Installing Cobra
First, we need to install Cobra. The official instructions recommend using the following command:
go get -u github.com/spf13/cobra/cobra
Unfortunately, this hangs indefinitely for me using Go 1.13.1. However, this command works:
go get -u github.com/spf13/cobra/cobra/...
Try the above commands in the following terminal.
Cobra as a library
Once Cobra is installed, we can import it as a library into our application:
import "github.com/spf13/cobra"
At this point, we can start using ...