61 pages

Go

Building a web service with go-tool-base, part 2: a gRPC service, with TLS

The heartbeat from part 1 runs, ticks along, and shuts down politely when you ask it to. It also talks to absolutely no one. A service people can actually call needs an API, and for a typed, fast, streaming-capable one, …

Building a web service with go-tool-base, part 1: lifecycle and graceful shutdown

A CLI does its job and gets out of the way. You run it, it prints something or writes a file, the process exits, done. Then one day you want the opposite: a thing that stays running. A server answering requests, a worker …

Building a CLI with go-tool-base, part 5: a CLI that updates itself

You ship version one. A week later someone finds a bug, you fix it, you cut version two. Now for the awkward part: how does the person who installed version one ever get version two? Email them? Hope they wander back to …

Building a CLI with go-tool-base, part 4: an AI dungeon master

I run a Dungeons & Dragons game on the odd weekend, so when I sat down to put an AI feature inside a CLI, my first instinct wasn’t a chatbot. It was: could the tool run a little adventure, with an AI as the dungeon …

Building a CLI with go-tool-base, part 3: expose your CLI to AI agents

“Make it work with AI” is the request that lands on your desk with a thud and no further detail. The first time it landed on mine I braced for a treadmill of integration work: an adapter for this assistant, a wrapper for …

Building a CLI with go-tool-base, part 2: configuration your tool can trust

In part 1 you scaffolded a tool and gave it a hello command. It says the same thing every time, which is fine for a first command and useless for a real one. The moment a tool does anything worth doing it needs settings: …

Building a CLI with go-tool-base, part 1: scaffold and your first command

Every time I start a new Go CLI, the first hour goes the same way, and none of it is the actual tool. Config loading. A logger. An update command. An error path that prints something a human can act on. A help system. I …

Reloading config without a restart

A config file changes. Someone edits a setting, rotates a credential, flips a feature flag. How does the running process find out? For most processes the answer is blunt: it doesn’t, until you restart it. For a …

Verifying your own downloads: how I solved it for self-updating CLI tools

Way back in the introduction I promised I’d come back to the self-update integrity checks. Here we are. And the starting point is a slightly uncomfortable admission: for a good long while, go-tool-base’s update command …

What survives a port, and what doesn't

Rebuilding go-tool-base in Rust turned out to be the most honest design review I’ve ever sat through, and I didn’t have to do anything except keep going. Porting a framework into a language with completely different …