Versioning binaries in Go

In this article we will learn how to add a version to our binaries in Go using a Makefile file and a third party package to print our logo in ASCII code.

Having a version in our binaries is very important since with it, we could know which version of our application we are running on production, in addition our users could report errors for specific versions and thus be able to fix them.

Makefile to create the binary add version, and build time

# Get version from git hash
git_hash := $(shell git rev-parse --short HEAD || echo 'development')

# Get current date
current_time = $(shell date +"%Y-%m-%d:T%H:%M:%S")

# Add linker flags
linker_flags = '-s -X main.buildTime=${current_time} -X main.version=${git_hash}'

# Build binaries for current OS and Linux
.PHONY:
build:
    @echo "Building binaries..."
    go build -ldflags=${linker_flags} -o=./bin/binver ./main.go
    GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build -ldflags=${linker_flags} -o=./bin/linux_amd64/binver ./main.go

After this we will only need to execute the make build command from our terminal to create the binary with its respective version and build time.

Create the main file in Go

package main

import (
    "flag"
    "fmt"
    "os"

    "github.com/morikuni/aec"
)

var (
    buildTime string
    version   string
)

const binverFigletStr = `
_     _
| |__ (_)_ ____   _____ _ __
| '_ \| | '_ \ \ / / _ \ '__|
| |_) | | | | \ V /  __/ |
|_.__/|_|_| |_|\_/ \___|_|

`

func printASCIIArt() {
    binverLogo := aec.LightGreenF.Apply(binverFigletStr)
    fmt.Println(binverLogo)
}

func main() {
    displayVersion := flag.Bool("version", false, "Display version and exit")

    flag.Parse()

    if *displayVersion {
        printASCIIArt()
        fmt.Printf("Version:\t%s\n", version)
        fmt.Printf("Build time:\t%s\n", buildTime)
        os.Exit(0)
    }
}

Repository and video

If you want to see the complete code or the video where I explain how to do it step by step I leave you here the links:

• GitHub repository
• Video tutorial (In Spanish).

Comments

[dylannorthrup]

I know this isn't what you wrote about, but thank you for the pointer to github.com/morikuni/aec . I've been trying to find a simple way to output ANSI escape codes and this looks like it should fit the bill. Thanks!

[Junxiao Shi]

I used to have this, but I'm told that including build time goes against reproducible builds.
Now I switched to use the commit time as seen in git history:
github.com/usnistgov/ndn-dpdk/tree...
I even added Go code so that the version is printed in the same format as Go modules would.

[Gustavo Castillo]

Nice! I'll take a look, thanks for sharing.